Salcai is going to have to launch an awareness campaign this week because peninsular winds are arriving. Alsa wants lines 30, 55, 60 and 91 that Salcai currently has to be put out to tender or for there to be various operators that can opt for that service. The Asturian company hopes to be able to present its credentials from June 2024 once the shareholders meeting of the company is held. nationalist company Grupo 1844 and that operates under the Canarybus brand.
These lines are in dispute but the Tirajana corporation between 2019 and 2023 commissioned a report to launch a municipal bus company that would keep a good part of the service and, where profitability is not the Las Palmas-Tunte line (which is what Salcai has) but those invented like those in Maspalomas or Playa del Inglés. Will Salcai be able to generate unanimity like in 1999 when the CNMC blocked the union with Utinsa, now Global? Salcai, created with the support of priests, has become like a port dockworkers' company where jobs would be inherited or relocated to relatives of shareholders. That is to say: since Ángel Luis Sánchez Bolaños left management, the company would have disconnected from Gran Canaria civil society.
Salcai and Utinsa were born when Alsa was 50 years old. The Asturian company has a fleet of 5.600 buses and a staff of 16.000 professionals, which last year served 553 million passengers and operates in Morocco, Portugal, Switzerland and France. Despite the enormous difficulties endured by the civil war and the postwar period, the company continued its path of growth, which had a decisive milestone in 1960, when the Cosmen Company merged with Alsa, and José Cosmen Adelaida joined the management of the company. company.
From then on and in the following decades, the company undertook both national and international expansion. In 1964, the regular service between Asturias and Madrid began, and a year later, the first international service between Oviedo, Paris and Brussels began, promoted, to a large extent, by Spanish emigration. In the 70s and 80s, Alsa also established itself in various autonomous communities. In the 90s, it bought other regional companies, in addition to the public Enatcar, and began its operations in Morocco, where today it is the first urban transport company in the country. In 2005 Alsa joined the National Express Group, a multimodal operator with a presence in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, and in 2008 it acquired Continental Auto, an operation that would confirm its national leadership.
