A TOURISM chief has spoken of his hopes for 2021 following the "catastrophic" impact of Covid-19 on the region.

The Leader has previously reported on the concerns of Jim Jones, the chief executive of North Wales Tourism, regarding the effect of the virus on the tourism and hospitality industry.

Looking ahead to next year, he said: “Personally, I can’t wait to see the back of 2020 as we look forward with optimism to 2021 when we can reboot our economy and get on the road to recovery.

“During 2020 our businesses were pushed towards failure, many jobs have been lost as a result of ill-thought out government policies, confusion and the lack of financial support for the tourism and hospitality sector.

“One example of how business was let down was the frustration and distress caused by the fiasco of the application process for financial assistance from phase three of Economic Resilience Fund.

“The impact of Covid-19 on tourism sector in the region has been absolutely catastrophic.

“The devastating scale of the economic disaster was laid bare in a new report from STEAM (Scarborough Tourism Economic Activity Monitor).

“It shows that tourism and hospitality has seen a disastrous loss of £2.17 billion to the economy of North Wales. That's a loss of 63 per cent and a shrinkage in the sector to levels from over 20 years ago.

“This is a huge hammer blow. Prior to the Covid crisis, we were celebrating that in 2019 tourism had attracted record numbers of visitors and revenue rose to an all-time high of £3.6 billion.

“Until the pandemic struck, the visitor economy was continuing to grow strongly and provided jobs for more than 43,000 people.

“The 63 per cent shrinkage is in real terms does not take into account how much the economy was predicted to grow this year. If you do that, then the losses are even starker.

“The situation is also bleak across the overall UK hospitality sector which is on course to lose more than £53 billion in sales during 2020 and this is just the period between April and September

“To add to our economic woes, the recent research commissioned by the North Wales and Mersey Dee Business Council and North Wales Tourism showed up to 80 per cent of business owners are experiencing a deterioration in their mental and physical health.

“Moving into to 2021, the approval of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is wonderful news. It is definitely a gamechanger and poignantly it is being manufactured here in North Wales by the pharmaceutical company Wockhardt at their base in Wrexham.

“At North Wales Tourism, we have been listening to our members and lobbying to politicians and Welsh Government.

“We have been working extremely hard to disseminate the messaging, changes to guidelines as quickly as we can across many of our channels.

“That work will still continue as we also look forward and ready to go out to market with our marketing plans showcasing the best of North Wales.

“We know once visitors are allowed to revisit, they will flock to our destinations and hopefully our businesses can try and get back on track to some form of normality.

“However, there will still be challenges for places like Snowdonia National Park and the Clwydian Range to manage the influx of visitors appropriately.

“Let’s hope we don’t have a repeat of 2020, and firm plans will be in place to deal with not just the domestic market but hopefully the return of the International market.

“It shouldn’t take long for us to regain our confidence as an outward looking confident world class region.”

The Welsh Government was approached by the Leader for comment.