Off-piste or piste-off?

The first big creative innovation this year has turned out to be the combination of the festive period with the mid-term school break. At this time of year, kids would usually be jumping up and down for joy for a month of no lessons – if it wasn’t for the fact that all the hotels and ski slopes are closed and that it’s also extremely difficult to travel around Europe. Normally, after publishing the first magazine of the year, our entire editorial team would – just like most of our readers – take a well deserved winter break; but this year everything has been turned on its head. Just as everything was just starting to settle down, the authorities again decided to give things a good old shake-up. As a result of this Covid danse macabre, all our plans for the winter break have been thrown up in the air and now make just as much sense as the simultaneous chatterings of a million market analysts of every sort. I do hope, dear readers, that you can appreciate just how difficult it is to prepare all the materials for our magazine in just a few weeks while operating in such a minefield.

Nevertheless, our team of journalistic sappers was clearly able to deal with such unexploded bombs, and as it turns out our January-February issue is well worth a close read. The main article of the issue is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, being devoted to the situation faced by hotels across Europe. They will need a good few years to dig themselves out of the hole they find themselves in. This issue also features the first interview with the new head of JLL in Poland, a man who both keeps his cards close to his chest while being open at the same time – as well as always being in the right place (although this latter assertion is something that we will only be able to conclusively confirm a few years from now). We also look into just how likely it is that tenants will be returning to their offices, as well as what retail chains have been doing to cope and the incredible somersaults they’ve been performing in order to operate with some kind of normality. In our legal section, we examine how the new rules for foreign investors could potentially shake up the real estate market.

If in spite of this ‘new situation in which we find ourselves’, you somehow manage to take a few days off this winter, do take a copy of the latest issue of Eurobuild with you to read in the queue for the ski-lift in Davos or some Czech resort. Because this year I certainly wouldn’t advise you to go skiing in the Polish Tatras or the French Alps.