Southern Gran Canaria received news this Thursday that has shaken the foundations of its main economic engine: the end of an era for one of its most loyal partners. Andreas Rüttgers, the veteran Tourism Director of Schauinsland-Reisen, the company with the highest revenue in southern Gran Canaria (since Lopesan absurdly maintains its headquarters in Las Palmas), is leaving the company after 32 years. Rüttgers, who for decades has been a trusted advisor to hoteliers in San Bartolomé de Tirajana and Mogán, is leaving the company.
For the tourism sector in the south of the island, Rüttgers' departure is not just another exit in a German organizational chart. For more than three decades, Rüttgers was the strategist who decided which hotels in Playa del Inglés, Maspalomas, or Meloneras would fill their beds with tourists from Duisburg. Under his leadership in hotel acquisitions and product development, Schauinsland-Reisen established itself as the tour operator that best understood the unique character of southern Gran Canaria, maintaining unwavering loyalty to the destination even during times of greatest global uncertainty.
The separation, which the company has described as a "mutual agreement based on trust," leaves a void in direct communication with Canary Island business owners. Rüttgers didn't just buy hotel rooms; he had in-depth knowledge of the island market and was a regular figure in the forums where the future of the south's accommodation sector was decided. His "intuition," praised today by the company in its farewell message, was key to thousands of German families choosing the Maspalomas dunes as their holiday retreat year after year.
This move is part of the profound restructuring that the Kassner family began in November 2025. With Steffen Kassner taking the helm and the promotion of internal executives like Markus Förster and Detlef Schroer, the tour operator is seeking a "new impetus" that will also include external leaders. However, in the offices of the hotel complexes in southern Gran Canaria, the question on Thursday was who will carry on the close personal relationship that Rüttgers cultivated with the south of the island. A chapter of three decades of German stability on our shores is closing, opening a period of uncertainty about how the Duisburg-based giant will now pivot its strategy in the Atlantic.
