Pärnu spas full during weekends
Even though during the weekends, spas in the resort town of Pärnu are completely booked up, there is a limit valid from spring, where half of the places need to be free. In this way, visitors with accommodation bookings are also waiting in the line of the spa area.
Head of the Tervis Spa Group, Jaan Ratnik, told ERR that the venue is fully booked on Saturdays and on Fridays, around 70 percent of the rooms are booked.
"The rest of the days are very weak, we are talking about 30 percent or less. If I am looking at the economic outturn of September - today I don't have the final outturn for October- then we are burning this money to operate. The great task in a situation where the expenses are bigger than the income is to see if and how could we manage until spring," Ratnik said.
The 50 percent rule needs to be followed as well.
"When in the meantime, in lots of areas, no restrictions were established, then for spas, the 50 percent requirement was implemented in spring, it was set throughout the summer and is set now. This has caused lines of people behind the ticket desk and anger of the clients. And then people are of course thinking that the house is fully booked. Actually, we are regulating the occupancy of the spa by limiting the number of storage cabinets."
The situation in the city-owned Estonia spas is the same.
"The situation in Pärnu is somewhat better than in the rest of Estonia, especially compared to Tallinn because, during the weekends, the spas are full. But there are seven days in the week and if on two days, the occupancy is 100 percent and on other days, it is around 20 percent, then it's not more than 50 percent on average. We are in the red and things are not going great," the manager of Estonian spas, Andrus Aljas, said.
Regardless of this, it has to be ensured that the clients are safe. The sign on the company's door indicates this.
"We actually already started it in the spring, during the first coronavirus wave. Those companies that seriously cared about their customers came together and thought that we will do even more than we needed to make customers feel safe with us. This gave birth to the sign that it is safe here. We also got the Pärnu city government to cooperate, which is coordinating this activity. This sign on the door means to the customer that if he visits when he or she is healthy, if he or she fulfills all the recommendations, we give him or her, and we do everything we can to make this person leave healthy as well," Andrus Aljas explained.
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Editor: Roberta Vaino