The clamor comes from an office in Hanover, but its echo reverberates with the force of a cyclone off the coast of Maspalomas. Sebastian Ebel, the CEO of TUI, the giant German tour operator, has raised his voice, and his cry of alarm is not a corporate lament, but a warning that we should heed with the attention of someone who sees a perfect storm approaching. According to him, the Berlin government is turning vacations into a luxury, "artificially inflating" them with taxes, levies, and regulations that, in their twisted path, threaten to leave a trail of famine in sunny paradises like ours.
Ebel doesn't mince words. He points the finger at a German government that, on the one hand, pays lip service to promises of economic recovery and, on the other, imposes a tax system that suffocates tourists in their own homes. "Germany has the highest rates and taxes on flights!" he exclaims, and one can almost hear the echo of a hammer hitting a table in some official office. It's the contradiction of a short-sighted economic policy: it talks about prosperity, but makes the only escape from prosperity available to millions of Germans more expensive: a trip to the beach.
The "security fund" that the federal government created to protect consumers has become, according to the head of TUI, a bureaucratic monster, "excessive" and "oversized," that takes money out of tourists' pockets. A tax that is justified as a safeguard, but in practice is a disguised tax that raises the price of the vacation package. In other words, the German government protects you... by taking your money. It's the perfect sarcasm.
And here, in Maspalomas, we are the final recipients of this inverted logic. This isn't our problem; it's the aftermath of someone else's problem, a storm brewing in the north that reaches our shores with the scent of the euro lost along the way. German tourists, the pillar upon which the hotel towers of Meloneras and the restaurants of Playa del Inglés are built, are the hostages of this dispute. Every euro extracted from them in taxes and fees at a German airport is one less euro they'll spend here. One less euro on a drink, a dinner, an excursion, or a hammock.
Ebel's complaint, echoed by Marija Linnhoff, president of the Association of Independent Travel Agencies, is not a lament from the rich. It's a warning about the main artery of our economy. If the German government raises the price of vacations, fewer Germans will come. And if fewer Germans come, businesses in Maspalomas will suffer, jobs will falter, and the prosperity we have worked so hard to build will crumble.
Ebel takes a direct shot at the political leaders, Friedrich Merz and Lars Klingbeil, and reminds them of their promises of "a new economic policy." He tells them, with the honesty that comes with having money, that promises "must be kept." But here, at the other end of the spectrum, we know that between political promises and economic reality there is often a chasm. A chasm that, in this case, is measured in excessive airport taxes and security funds.
Ultimately, the story we hear from Germany isn't about tourism, but about power, money, and bureaucracy. It's the story of how decisions made in a country with gray skies can have a direct impact on the sunshine of a tropical paradise. The "artificially inflated money" that Ebel and Linnhoff denounce in their Berlin offices is the same money missing from the tills of our beach bars, from the accounting records of our hotels, and from the pockets of the workers of Maspalomas. And that is the true luxury that this aggressive taxation threatens to take away from us.
