Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high
Your daddy’s rich and your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush, little baby, don’t you cry
So goes the much-beloved aria “Summertime” in George Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. Updating the song and adapting it to reflect the Israeli consumer reality in the summer of 2021, the lyrics might go something like this:
Summertime, and the livin’ is a fortune
Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high
If your daddy’s rich you can afford an Israeli vacation
If not, go ahead baby, why don’t you cry
Nine months after the country’s hoteliers and tzimmer (guest house) owners were crying nightly on the evening news programs about how badly they were being hit from the coronavirus – evincing a great deal of sympathy from the average Israeli who genuinely felt for their plight – many of those entrepreneurs are now bringing those same Israelis to tears by jacking up their prices to the heavens.
According to a report in Yediot Ahronot, the price for hotels in this country’s most sought out vacation spots this summer – Eilat and the Dead Sea – are between 20% and 30% more than they were in July 2019, the last summer before the coronavirus hit.
The average price for a family of four for three nights, half-board at a four- and five-star hotel in Eilat in July and August is NIS 8,000 ($2,450). A similar vacation in Tel Aviv will cost NIS 7,555 ($2,319). And that’s without even stepping out of the hotel.
That kind of increase is just wrong. It’s wrong that a three-night stay in a hotel in Cyprus for a couple and a toddler – including airfare – is half the price of what it is in Eilat. It’s simply crazy that a family of four can spend two weeks at a hotel in Georgia for a third of what it would cost that same family to spend for a week in an Eilat hotel.
And what makes this all the more galling is that the country’s long-suffering consumers are being told by the government, including Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, to demonstrate national responsibility and avoid non-essential travel abroad.
So, on the one hand, Israelis are being told to spend their summer vacations in Israel, yet on the other, if they want to go anywhere they will have to pay an arm and a leg. Talk about a captive consumer.
Understandably, hotel and tzimmer owners want to make a buck. They are not in the hospitality business just to be hospitable. But there is a big difference between making a healthy profit, and being piggish.
The hotel and tzimmer owners wanted and received public support during the dark days of the coronavirus to get healthy packages of assistance from the government to hold them over. They should remember that solidarity and repay it just a fraction by not hiking prices through the roof just because they can.
And this is not just an appeal to altruism.
In the summer of 2011, the country’s major food producers realized the limits of their ability to endlessly raise the price of basic commodities – such as cottage cheese – without facing a consumer rebellion. The high cost of food triggered a summer of social protests that both created consumer pressure on the food companies not to raise their prices, and led to more competition in the food market that helped bring prices down over the long term.
Sky-high hotel and tzimmer prices this summer could have a similar impact and trigger a mini-consumer revolt. With the current uptick in Covid-19 cases placing question marks around the degree to which Israel will be able to open up to outside tourism, the hotel industry is going to be dependent on domestic tourism for the foreseeable future. They would be wise, therefore, to cultivate the goodwill of the domestic market now by not taking advantage of the current situation to ask outrageous prices.
Today, Israeli tourists need the hotels; tomorrow it will be the other way around. The hospitality industry should remember this, and show some reasonableness and proportionality when setting prices.