At the beginning of a contract, the Group assesses whether it contains a lease. A contract is, of contains, a lease if it gives the right to control the use of the asset identified during a period of time in exchange for a consideration. Leases are recognised as a right-of-use asset and the corresponding liability on the date the leased asset is available for use by the group.
Assets and liabilities arising from a lease are initially valued based on their present value. Leasing liabilities include the net present value of the following leasing payments
• Fixed payments (including fixed payments in essence), less any lease incentive collectable.
• Variable payments for leases that reply on an index or rate, initially valued according to the index or rate on the start date.
• Amounts expected to be paid by the group for residual value guarantees.
• The price to exercise a purchase option if the group is reasonably certain that it will exercise that option.
• Penalty payments terminating the lease if the term of the lease reflects the group exercising that option.
In order to determine the term of the lease contracts, the Group has taken as non-cancellable the initial term of each contract, taking the possible unilateral extensions at the option of the Group only in those cases in which it has been reasonably considered certain that they will be exercised, and only the cancellation options whose exercise has been reasonably considered certain have been taken into account.
The general determination of not including unilateral extension of contracts as a part of their term, is based on the Group´s historical experience. The windows for renewal have historically been used as renegotiation windows, unless the market situation was clearly favourable for the Group. Therefore, given that hotel rental agreements are normally signed with a first term that is higher than a macroeconomic cycle (5 years), our experience shows that is it highly probable that some unknown event may occur on the date the agreement is signed, and which may significantly affect such judgment. The attacks in Europe, in Brussels or in Nice, serve as an example, as does the actual pandemic, as they changed the economic paradigm and affected the frameworks for negotiating rent. Furthermore, to determine the term for lease agreements, the term for recovering the investments made in it are taken into account.
To determine lease terms, there are no penalties for not exercising the extensions mentioned above, nor have early terminations with penalties been included.
Contracts may contain leasing and non-leasing components. The Group assigns the consideration in the contract to the leasing and non-leasing components based on their relative independent prices. For real estate leases in which the Group cannot separate the leasing and non-leasing components, it accounts for them as a single leasing component.
Leasing payments are discounted using the implicit interest rate in the lease. If this rate cannot be easily determined, which is generally the case for the group’s leases, the incremental interest rate is used. The incremental interest rate is the interest rate that the lessee would incur at the commencement of the lease if it borrowed, over a period of time, with similar guarantees and in a similar economic environment. The interest was calculated as a combination of the following elements:
• CDS curve of the economic environment
• Euribor Swap Rate Curve.
• Synthetic NH CDS curve.
These elements were combined to obtain an interest rate curve for each contract based on its geo-economics specificities and from which the calculation process consists of bringing each of the discounted flows to the present value at the interest rate corresponding to each maturity within said curve and calculating which single equivalent rate would be used to discount said flows.
Potential future increases in variable payments for leases based on an index or rate are not included in leasing liabilities until they take effect. When the adjustments to the leasing payments based on an index or rate take effect, the leasing liability is assessed again and set against the asset for right of use.
Leasing payments are allocated between principal and financial cost. The financial cost is charged to profit/(loss) during the leasing period in a manner that creates a periodic interest rate on the remaining balance of the liability for each period.
Right-of-use assets are valued at cost that comprises the following:
• The initial valuation amount of the leasing liability.
• Any leasing payment made on or before the state date, less any incentive to lease received.
• Any initial indirect cost.
• Restoration costs.
• Incentives to lease received from the lessor.
• Provision on onerous contracts.
In application of IFRS 16, all rent that does not come under the definition of fixed payments in substance and, therefore, is outside the Group’s maximum compulsory commitment, as they are not inevitable, is recorded as an operational expense for the year
Therefore, the Group records variable rent that is linked to exploitation of the underlying assets as an expense, along with those arising from percentages of sales and other similar reference points. Moreover, all rent that, in application of IFRS 16, are outside the Group’s maximum compulsory commitment are recorded as an operational expense for the year
Variable rents that are not, in essence, fixed and the way in which they may involve a liability for the Group would be that the flows arising from exploitation of the CGU are estimated to be negative and, therefore, the Group would be obliged to record a provision for onerous contracts.
An amendment to IFRS 16 was approved by the IASB on 28 May 2020 to help accounting for changes in leases resulting from the pandemic caused by Covid-19. The amendment establishes an exemption in which rental concessions caused by Covid-19 may not be recorded as amendments to the lease (Note 2.2.2).