Monte-Carlo: Hotel Metropole to shut until April 2021
Hotel Métropole Monte-Carlo
One of Monaco’s three Palace Hotels will shut from 30 November until April 2021.
Advertising
The latest casualty of the pandemic? Not quite. The Hotel Metropole in Monte-Carlo will shut for large-scale renovation works. The renovation is expected to last for 16 months. However, the hotel will be opened for the 2021 summer season, from April to September 2021.
As the pandemic takes a toll on the luxury hotel industry, the Metropole decided to anticipate the already-scheduled renovation. The industry has particularly been affected by the lack of international tourists, as Guy Antognelli, head of Monaco Tourism, stressed when we interviewed him last August. “We saw a small price drop of around 13%. This is mainly due to the absence of Russian, American and Middle Eastern visitors who usually book the bigger suites,” he told us.
“It can’t get much worse than now”
“The current state of the global economy convinced us that we should anticipate the already-scheduled renovation project,” Serges Ethuin, general manager of the Hotel metropole, told Monaco Info.
Ethuin’s comments echo a general sense of concern felt throughout the luxury hotel industry. Interviewed by Forbes France, several heads of other leading Palace Hotels described the uncertainty faced by their industry.
“The next few months will be full of pitfalls. We will somehow have to put Marrakech back on the world tourist map,” Jean-Claude Messant, head of the Royal Mansour, told Forbes. Words echoed by Pascal Billard, General Manager of the Majestic in Barcelona: “We must stay optimistic, and in any case, it cannot get much worse than now”.