This is the harshest warning issued to Gran Canaria's hoteliers in decades. Following the demonstrations organized by tens of thousands of Canary Islanders on April 20th regarding the increase in tourist arrivals to Tenerife, the islands are now perceived as a financially risky destination due to the announced tax restrictions for visitors . Tour operators in Germany believe that if the President of the Canary Islands Government, Fernando Clavijo, has asked the hotel sector to raise wages, "we will have to heed that request and respond with data in the appropriate forum; but also make it clear that we are the ones who will foot the bill, not them."
But there is more: in Germany, tour operators have warned hoteliers with whom they have medium and long-term agreements of alleged social dumping because they have detected hotel entrepreneurs who allocate their profits to investing in vacation homes that are placed on Booking or Airbnb, the bête noire of the sector for not being regulated and for the fiscal framework in which they operate.
"If we pay the staff it is for the hotel business, not for other vacation businesses, whoever has vacation rentals next to the hotel, should clean it with different personnel." This is the message conveyed to Maspalomas24H by a director of a tour operator from Germany to whom we have granted anonymity upon request to protect the interests of his company in the south of Gran Canaria. "In the Canary Islands there is tourismphobia because of us, the tour operators, who do not "We have been able in decades to tell island citizens that we pay the staff bill in many cases and they accuse us of fleecing people with low salaries, we pay the bill they pass on to us."
The same source attributed the Las Kellys phenomenon "to an internal matter in Spain regarding labor legislation" and that "The funds that invest in tourism are increasingly more aware of what happens with the Kellys in the Canary Islands because their money comes from pension funds" and "money managers do not want problems with groups of social activists on their boards."
The new message that the tour operators are going to begin to send to the regulatory authorities of the islands because "we have already detected for some time that cleaning staff to attend to our quality is being diverted to vacation homes, which is a product that we do not we approve, generating inappropriate practices, not in all cases, but they exist. Regarding the payment of staff, a little-known aspect of how the industry works in some agreements with hoteliers, the same source specified that "it is obvious that historically it is passed on to us in the price of the bed."
The CEO of TUI, Sebastián Ebel, said this April in Germany that residential stays unrelated to the tour operation put the quality of destinations like the south of Gran Canaria at risk. Last January Ebel said that "politicians cannot continue to put pressure on us" since "flying is demonized, so is traveling by cruise. Tourists are bombarded with excessive rules and prohibitions" while the holders of vacation homes on digital platforms "They are largely free to sell their unregulated products, which are not very consumer friendly."
Ebel In April he explained to the German magazine of tourism professionals FVW that "more and more living spaces are offered as vacation rentals on online platforms such as Airbnb, which are largely unregulated" and that "the fact that local politics has not yet acted is pushing people to take to the streets." Ebel added in FVW that "the good image of tourism should not be harmed by excesses such as those that have apparently occurred" because "the Canary Islands have been one of our clients' favorite vacation destinations for years."
