EU Believes Vaccination Is Crucial For Saving European Tourism

"The pandemic has caused an unprecedented crisis in the tourism industry. Hotel room prices dropped 50% in 2020, and cross border tourism shrunk by about 70%. The crisis has affected millions of jobs, and obviously, the same number of families", said Thierry Breton, an European Commissioner for Internal Market in Brussels.

Nonetheless, he has "hope as the vacation season is on the horizon".

"First of all, it's the EU's vaccination strategy... I believe that 70% of EU adults will have access to the vaccine before mid-June", he added, saying it will be the main factor for allowing travel.

He has also stressed that the EU green certificate will play an important part in rebuilding the travel industry, and might be introduced in June.

He has emphasized the need for everyone to comply with the existing health safety requirements and for the hospitality industry to be prepared for the coming season.

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Israel Is Back On The Tourist Map

The country’s Tourism Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen has presented a recovery and development plan for the industry:

 1. International tourism incentive program.
 2. Cultural, sporting and entertainment events designed to boost tourism. These events are planned to take place in Israel in the coming months.
 3. Reopen air travel to Eilat.
 4. Develop a pilot reopening project for vaccinated tourists starting May 23.

Orit Farkash-Hacohen added: "It is our time to utilize Israel's huge advantage as a health-safe destination, and harness it for the benefit of our empty coffers and the tourism industry, which includes hundreds of thousands of workers. I think it is about time that the huge advantage that Israel has as a healthy and vaccinated destination [is harnessed]".

No Less Than 28$: Egypt Hotel Prices

Over the past few years Egyptian lawmakers and hoteliers have battled over regulation of the country’s hospitality market, namely, minimum hotel rates. This would give the local businesses some legal leverage in negotiations with foreign contractors and partners, as well as an argument for increasing prices.

Khaled al-Anany, the first Minister of Antiquities and Tourism, has recently signed a resolution setting the minimum nightly rate at hotels in Egypt. The Minister’s decision came after consulting with the Egyptian Tourism Federation on standardizing hotel rates. The rate for four-star hotels will be set at US $28, or its equivalent, and the minimum nightly fee for a hotel room in a five-star establishment will be US $40, or its equivalent in foreign currency.

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Brazilian Coronavirus Variant Threatens International Tourism In 2021

A new strain of coronavirus seen spreading across Brazil appears to be twice as contagious as other COVID strains. This has the potential to negatively affect the epidemiologic situation in the world and even a new round of air travel restrictions.

If governments don’t stop the new strain from spreading, the situation might take a turn for the worse for tourists and other travelers: the Brazilian variant has already been spotted in 36 countries.

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Another Catastrophic Year Ahead For Turkey

A worrying surge in Covid-19 cases in Turkey combined with the continued global decline in tourism is threatening Ankara’s hopes for recovery, a Washington DC-based news outlet Al-Monitor reports.

The Turkish government is being criticized for its ineffective management of the pandemic crisis. The surge in cases is forcing Ankara to reimplement lockdown measures, shattering the hopes for European countries that constitute the majority of tourist traffic to Turkey to relax some of the travel restrictions ahead of the upcoming tourist season.

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Spain Hotels Resist Foreign Buyers

Spain has become a magnet for foreign real estate investors, providing a great opportunity to buy resort hotels at a discount after the covid crisis has ravaged the tourism industry.

However, thanks to support from the government, local hoteliers are holding onto their property.

In an effort to save the local market, the government is aiding the industry through incentive programs and subsidies.

In 2020 Spain suffered an 80% drop in profits from tourism, forcing most chain and family-owned hotels to close down. It used to be the second most visited country in the world. Dozens of international real estate funds saw this as a prime opportunity to buy up the local industry at a discount.

Thanks to vacation programs and government-backed loans, hotels managed to survive 2020 without changing hands too much. Nonetheless, there are sellers out there.

Italy is going through a similar situation, where real estate investors are seeking out opportunities to renovate hotels before mass tourism comes back, which is believed to happen sometime after 2023.

In Greece, large hotel chains, such as Four Seasons, opened their doors ahead of time, promoting renewed investor interest in the local market. Several dozen three to four-star hotels have been foreclosed and sold off to new owners.

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Hainan Saw Tourism Profits Quadruple In One Year

Such rapid recovery is spurred by the continued COVID-19 restrictions on international tourism, making the island a prime domestic tourist destination.

By 2025, Hainan authorities aim to reshape the province into an “international tourism and consumer hub”. This Chinese island is often called the “Eastern Hawaii'' due to its scenic landscape, tropical vegetation and a well-developed network of hotels. Its 1.9 thousand kilometers long coastline of sandy beach makes for a holiday destination sought after by vacationers from all over the world.

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Italy Prepares For Tourists

In the near future Italian authorities might start the process of reopening the country for international travel, previously sealed shut due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The opening is supposed to happen on Republic Day, celebrated nationwide on June 2.
Italy’s Tourism Minister, Massimo Garavaglia, says the government is looking at three key conditions for allowing visitors in: they must be either fully vaccinated, have the certificates proving their immunity, or have a negative COVID-19 test result. In addition to that, the local population at popular resorts will have to vaccinate too.

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Spain To Open Islands For Tourists In June

In March, the Spanish authorities announced that by June a digital green certificate will be operational, allowing tourists to enter the country, including Ibiza, Mallorca and the rest of the Balearic islands. Spain's general secretary of Digital Health, Information and Innovation has announced that recently-developed COVID-19 passports — officially recognised as Digital Green Certificates — will allow EU residents to enter the country without coronavirus testing or quarantine

In a press conference on the national television, Spain’s tourism minister Reyes Maroto said that the certificates would allow Spain to "reopen safely" and be "pioneers" in global tourism following the coronavirus pandemic, as well as providing "safe mobility" for tourists.

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Europeans Continue Protesting Lockdowns

Last weekend Europe saw new protests against health safety restrictions.

Hundreds of maskless people gathered in the northern Swiss town of Schaffhausen, despite the government disapproval: the town authorities insisted on cancelling the demonstrations, citing potential violation of health safety measures.

In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, protesters briefly blocked the street where the country’s Parliament is situated. The primary grievance communicated to the authorities was the non-existent access to COVID vaccines in the country.

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Maldives WIll No Longer Test Vaccinated Tourists

”Travelers to Maldives (including tourists) who have completed their two doses of Covid-19 vaccination (recognised by WHO) 2 weeks prior to travel are now exempted from the pre-arrival Negative PCR requirement and do not require to undergo or observe the travel quarantine on arrival to the Maldives", reads the statement from the Ministry of Tourism.

To enter the country visitors must have a negative PCR test certificate in English, made no earlier than 96 hours before the arrival. In addition to this, all travellers to the Maldives must submit a Health Declaration Form by uploading it to the immigration service website no more than 24 hours before departure.

The Maldives, after closing their borders in March 2020, were among the first to reopen them to foreign travellers.

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COVID-19: Europeans Expect Relaxed Quarantine Rules

Italy, one of the worst affected by COVID-19, made tourists happy this week by announcing it may start reopening borders on June 2.

What this news means is that international tourism is on its way to full recovery despite the third wave of the pandemic. There will only be one requirement — the person must be fully vaccinated.

Germany seeks talks with Russia about procuring Sputnik V supplies. This goes against the sentiment of the EU in regards to the Russian vaccine.

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Importance of the Data Platform for Hospitality

Kristofer Holmquist, engineer & computer scientist speaks about how innovative technologies are transforming the hospitality industry.

▶️https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDFzMpSiuwU

Four Day Week To Boost Tourism

Japan considers bringing in four-day week.

Japan's government is considering bringing in a four-day working week aimed at improving people's quality of life, the country's Chief Cabinet Secretary has said.

The authorities intend to consider the introduction of a 'selective three-day weekly holiday system'.

Economists hope that the scheme would also boost the country's tourism industry that has been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Dominican Republic Revives Tourism

The country’s Tourism Ministry reveals positive data about the recovery of international tourism to the island nation.

According to the ministry, in March 2021, Dominican Republic saw 263 857 foreign visitors, which is 56% more than in February 2021, and 3.4% more than in March 2020.

“The March 2021 rebound in international tourism to Dominican Republic is a clear sign that our reactivation strategy is being successful,” said Tourism Minister David Collado. “This government’s objective has been to regain the international traveler’s confidence, implementing protocols and effective initiatives with impact on the entire value chain, and [March’s] figures prove that we are on the right track.”

In the last week of March, the occupancy rate in the Dominican Republic reached 70.6%. This is the highest it has been over the past twelve months.

What’s more important, the occupancy rate as of 1 April 2021 has surpassed pre-crisis levels.

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How does ModiHost’s Pool Lending work

In times of negative interest rates, investors are looking to get out of cash and move to assets that generate returns. Staking could be the answer. Many exchanges provide opportunities to stake tokens and in exchange earn rewards. One can safely earn 5% per annum on a popular digital asset such as ETH.

At Modihost we have developed a similar mechanism to staking that rewards buying and holding of AIM tokens. It’s called a lending pool - which has token holders on one side who provide the liquidity and hotels on the other hand that need tokens to use the system.

In this short article we give some high level insights into pools and how we implemented them in our Hotel Management System (HMS) to make the ecosystem, whilst providing incentives to all participants.

What are pools?

A pool is a group of individuals working together towards achieving a common goal. The way that these groups of individuals work together differs between each consensus in the blockchain industry.

The most common type of consensus is Proof-of-Work (PoW), which uses the mining mechanism to generate new coins in a process known as minting (Bitcoin is a good example). The pool related to that process is known as a Mining Pool. A mining pool allows individuals to join together, allocating their mining powers (hashrate) to the pool, which in return allows the pool to be a single entity responsible for minting new coins. This allows the pool to gain more rewards, and in return, the rewards are split among individuals in the pool based on their contributions (in this case, mining power in Hash Rate). Over the past few years mining pools have become a necessity for miners to generate good returns, a mining pool such as EtherMine (https://ethermine.org/) has over 222,000+ miners that are working automatically around the clock.

In another example, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) was created recently in order to combat the downside of PoW - the massive negative impact on the environment due to the extremely high consumption of electricity required to run the mining machines. PoS pools allow groups of individuals to stake their tokens into a specific wallet, which in return generates rewards based on the amounts that are staked (the higher the amount of crypto staked the more the reward, a similar structure to a fixed deposit in conventional finance), which are then split among the individuals in the pool based on their staked amount (in this case number of tokens). An example of PoS is Ethereum 2.0.

The ModiHost Unique Pool Lending System

ModiHost’s unique lending system allows individuals to group together into a pool and work towards earning rewards based on the pool’s criteria, thus creating a consistent flow of AIM tokens throughout the system. The system is known as a “Pool Lending System”, which combines the good traits of PoW and PoS to create a unique pool mechanism.

A Pool Lending System allows the integration between token holders, hotels, & ModiHost’s unique HMS & AI Systems all together. This system allows individuals to allocate their AIM tokens into a pool in which the amount of allocated AIM tokens are used to satisfy the requirements of the hotels, who use these tokens as a method of payment for Modihost’s HMS & AI services. This integration allows hotels to always find the liquidity required to facilitate their work, and in return rewarding AIM token holders with incentives and appealing returns depending on the pool’s criteria. All of this is done with full transparency and can be viewed through the Pool Lending Explorer (https://explorer.modihost.ai/) in real-time.

ModiHost’s ecosystem allows a steady flow of AIM tokens towards every aspect of the business. Hotels are using the AIM tokens to pay for services, token holders are providing the liquidity and lending the hotels at a specific rate, and ModiHost is receiving the AIM tokens that are paid by the hotels and paying back the Pool Owners who split the tokens among the pool at the agreed rates. This is all already up and running and fully automated.



How to get involved to earn AIM rewards

In order to get started, you will need to purchase AIM tokens, as these are the center of the ecosystem. AIM Tokens can be bought from HitBTC (https://hitbtc.com/aim-to-btc) after signing up and creating a wallet.

Make sure that the AIM tokens are transferred and held in your Scatter Wallet. To get a Scatter wallet you can simply go to (https://get-scatter.com/) and download the app on desktop for Windows, Mac, or Linux. Once downloaded, set up an account by following the guide in the application itself. Once you get the address you can go ahead and store your AIM tokens there.

The diagram below shows the steps in order to purchase AIM tokens and allocate them utilizing the Pool Lending System.



About ModiHost

ModiHost is an innovative SaaS hotel management system facilitating easy access to AI technologies for hotels of any size or complexity.

Using blockchain for transparency, the system harnesses the power of AI to deliver the best possible customer experience – for hotels and their guests. ModiHost predicts customers' needs beyond their expectations.

The ModiHost team comprises global leaders from AI, Software Development and Hospitality industries. Their expertise and experience guided and informed the development of the ModiHost Platform. The ModiHost Platform increases a hotel’s upsales, eliminates repetitive tasks, has different options for communication between a hotel and individual guests and predicts a customer’s needs, thereby creating a unique, personalized client experience.

ModiHost has a solid plan for the future, a roadmap can be found on (https://modihost.io/) showcasing all the steps that the team is taking towards achieving the goals presented. In 2018 the global hotel market stood at $147.57 billion, but is projected to reach $211.54 billion by 2026. This shows the potential and reflects the future of the hotel industry globally.

Key points to highlight in the ModiHost roadmap are the following

1.Integration of AI technologies into Hotels
2.Evolving & improving the Hotel Management Systems (HMS)
3.Expanding the lending pools and allowing consistent flow of AIM supply to Hotels
4.Improving the position of AIM tokens and utilizing more use-cases

Token holders and hotels can expect great things to come in the near future as the team is working continuously to provide the best mechanism for token holders to gain incentives and returns, while providing hotels with top notch Hotel Management Systems (HMS) and AI Technologies.

Europe Looking Into Ways To Save Tourism

The number of global coronavirus infections is nearing 135 million. Europe is looking into the various ways it can save the coming tourist season. Italian authorities admit the possibility of opening the country for tourism in June. Spain, which saw a 90% drop in tourists, are also looking into the same course of action.

Europeans protest quarantine

Poland is not the only country to see people clashing with the police. Anti-lockdown protests have swept across Europe. In Vienna, people took to the streets demanding to repeal the curfew and reopen businesses.

A massive anti-lockdown protest has also taken place in the Netherlands.

Istanbul healthcare workers urge for a lockdown

In Turkey, local healthcare workers call for a complete lockdown once again. This comes from the Istanbul Medical Chamber. Doctors and nurses point out the fact that the number of new cases has increased tenfold over the past 6 weeks.

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Malta To Pay Its Visitors

Maltese authorities are planning to pay tourists up to 200 Euro to help the tourism industry recover.

The Minister of Tourism, Clayton Bartolo has clarified that the visiting tourists will only be eligible for the subsidy on one condition — if they stay for longer than three days. The visitors also have to stay in the local hotels, with five-star hotel guests eligible for 200 Euro, while four-star and three-star get 150 and 100 Euro respectively.

With that said, the subsidy is increased by 10% if the tourist books a hotel on the island of Gozo, which is part of the Maltese archipelago.

“The scheme is aimed at putting Malta’s hotels in a very competitive position as international tourism restarts,” Bartolo said.

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Season’s Novelties

The pandemic has left its imprint on how tourists plan for the upcoming spring-summer season.

These days travelers prefer:

1 Staycations — spending vacations in your own city, but in a different part of it, renting an apartment or a hotel room.

2. Slow travel. Many travelers prefer not to make concrete plans and rush or stress over not meeting their expectations.

3. Road trips. More tourists these days prefer traveling by car within their own countries.

4. Apartments and private residences. Less tourists are ready to come into contact with hotel staff and other guests. Many consider it important to have access to a personal kitchen.

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