by natasha FOWLER. at present.
675,000 people visited the Rijksmuseum in 2020. That’s the lowest since 1964, and 2 million down on 2019. 26% of all the visitors came from the city itself, this is a 20% increase in the years before. Some visitors moved online. 350,000 ‘visitors’ saw the Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close. In the hotel space this movement to digital has big impacts. Erwin van der Graaf, Vice President Operations at Accor, shared insights from his sector, “We used to fly to London, sometimes for a day, for one meeting, I’m pretty sure that’s over…you wouldn’t have done those meetings with video conferencing, it was all so underdeveloped. Now all of a sudden, we’re used to Zoom and Teams and the quality is very good.”
Jennifer Tosch, founder at Black Heritage Tours, has kept in touch digitally with the network of museums, academics, boat operators and cruise companies throughout this time apart. “When I grew the business it was all very organic…People started to hear about it through word of mouth and social media. I partnered with all the national museums… to bring new audiences, people who would never go”. The City that she will walk people through again next year is a different city and what people want from it might have changed too. Baptiste van Outryre, PR & Corporate Communications Manager at Roompot talked about the accommodation parks business. “For the 2021 bookings we see the typical city break periods are now coming to us. We already saw the trend before COVID, now there’s even more demand… Travellers that had been doubting city breaks before and probably thinking about carbon – they are now changing their habits.”
Bram Kortekaas, from Kaagman & Kortekaas, says “I think this COVID period will affect us for at least another 1.5 years. Our restaurant used to be crowded, you didn’t mind that they were close to one another. Now we want to be far as possible from one another… this reduces the capacity of the restaurant.” He owns a well-loved restaurant that began life consciously speaking only to the Dutch speaking community and grew to include the English speakers. Fellow long term restaurateur Pedro Mouneu began Piloncito, a new concept in October 2020. “What happens next is the future, no one knows what’s gonna. I do know that the world changed, that the hospitality business has changed and we need to be creative enough to continue, to not give up.”
Already in 2018 the city government launched the policy package called City in Balance attempting to influence the sort of tourism that was coming. The 2020 break in normality is helping more change happen. The City government recently announced their plan to restrict the use of cannabis by people who are visiting the Netherlands But what we saw in the summer was that the first guest that came back with exactly the sort the City says they don’t want. And, as Erwin pointed out the possibility of “revenge travel” is on the horizon.
Baptiste explained that a growing trend over the last few years, sees more and more of the Dutch staying here with our new 30 degree plus weather. The Prime Minister fueled the trend when he called us to stay at home for summer 2020. It remains a trend in Romompot’s 2021 summer bookings
The Prime Minister’s comments also helped make custom for a new form of luxury dining. Restaurants like Kaagman & Kortekaas and Rijks (attached to the museum) began high quality take away. “It’s not just about the food it’s the way you have to prepare the packages, the extra stuff that comes with it like the tutorial video”, says Bram. “The business has changed – we’re not making money, but also not losing money. I think what’s very important is that we’re still visible to people physically.” Pedro is also a restaurateur and one of three brothers with their nearly 20 year-old Mexican restaurant Los Pilones. Piloncito is his new initiative, it lives on social media and then on people’s door steps when they receive a conversation about life with their boxes of mexican food prepared in his kitchen.
Pedro described looking at the food that will be thrown away the day that he was told he had to close his restaurant doors within hours. Jennifer described the loss of over 150 confirmed tours instantly. Dizzying questions of what we do now. For many there was a sense of “we hold on and wait for the reopening in a few months”. But with the second lockdowns this disappeared. The reality of needing to change and maybe needing to change permanently emerged. On the eve of the December lockdown Accor were about to launch initiatives with large employers to repurpose hotel rooms as offices; keeping employees focused, away from family and home, whilst distant enough from other people. The Prime Minister announced that we needed to return to home work and the launch was delayed.
Two of the biggest mass tourism attractions for this town are cannabis and sex trade. The sex workers have shifted some work online and they have been recipients of business support from the cities government and central government. Erwin explained, “The City government had been trying to relocate the red light area but as long as it is in your face, you get a bit of control…we know that from the example of Airbnb”. He refers to the cases of illegal sex trade in Airbnb rentals that were uncovered in the past an fuelled the regulating of B&B business.
Besides the legitimate sex trade there are of course links to slavery in our times: human trafficking. Echoing the history of the town itself. The canal houses that people come to gaze at are memorials to the time where exploitation of people was normal business. How do you talk so people can listen to this story? Jennifer focuses on the human stories and explains the systems we are part of without blame, “This enslaved person lived here. Here’s their portrait, here’s her name in a document that shows she was enslaved until the death of her enslavers. Now, the stories can be a bridge. It doesn’t make it that Dutch people are bad, but just that the global economy that was built around that time period included the Dutch”. The education that went on last year about how we affect one another has changed what the tourist will ask of its hospitality. “If you look at groups like Nomadness there’s a trend growing in what people want from travel. So hotels and institutions have to get on board in becoming seen as racially friendly, if you will, as accommodating and inviting to all their guests. If you get tagged as one of those negative experiences, you can forget it – it’s going to show up in your bottom line.”
And what of the Dutch who are tourists in other places, Roompot spent 2020 acquiring and growing – as they will do in 2021 – knowing that the people in this City will drive a day to be somewhere a little bit warmer, a bit different. The geography, the space, the time that we will spend has changed. The restaurants will have more space between the tables. The residents of Amsterdam may have more space on their own streets. We will have plenty of space in the account sheet for last year. But I don’t know if we can resolve the losses through other gains, if we can manoeuvre spend that would’ve been spent by visitors becoming spend that is spent by those who didn’t get to visit anywhere else. This January 2012, this is the present.