Assen is pulling out the stops for the fans that can come
This year’s Dutch TT race in Assen will be held with a reduced crowd of 11,500, and with no ‘TT Festival’, but the horeca industry in the Drents capital is still gearing up for a big weekend.
“You see quite a lot of people who come from the TT Circuit. But also just people from the area who enjoy going into the city now,” says Bibi Mennega of 1809 Lodewijk Napoleon to RTV Drenthe.
Busy in the city
It is of course difficult to predict how busy it will be, but Mennega will deploy extra staff from today: “we’re just looking at how things are going”, she says.
You can’t even get a reservation at Grand Café ‘t Wapen from tomorrow. “I think it will be busy anyway,” says catering entrepreneur Ronald Obbes. “The TT is in the mindset of the Assenaren. But the measures mean that you are no longer allowed to have people on the terrace. So that’s just what we use.”
Sandra de Vrede of restaurant LIFF also assumes that visitors will come this weekend. “People will come anyway, especially Assenaren and Dutch.” De Vrede expects few foreign travelers, but does see that foreign employees of the MotoGP and participating teams also move into the city, so she has take a number of measures: “We have deployed extra staff and reservations are not possible for the weekend. And it just continues, because full is full.”
Photo by Eugene Lim on Unsplash
