The Canadian Blue Diamond jostles Accor in Cuba

On the borders of Old Havana and Centro Habana, where the capital’s seafront, the Malecon, meets Prado Avenue, the flagship of the Accor group, the Paseo del Prado hotel, inaugurated with great fanfare by Raul Castro in November 2019, has not been French since the beginning of August. The hexagonal group has ceded the management of one of the most luxurious hotels in Cuba to the Canadian Blue Diamond Resorts (BDR), which has renamed it Royalton Habana. The amount of the transaction is unknown, but Accor will not recover its stake. The French group would have invested between 20 and 40 million euros, the figures are still unclear on the island, for the construction of the establishment of 250 rooms. Like several hotels in Havana deserted due to the Covid pandemic, the Paseo has almost always been empty since it opened. While in 2019, the island received 4.3 million visitors, it only welcomed 356,000 in 2021 and 682,000 for the first half of 2022. In addition to around twenty Resorts…