The Tourism Board explodes against the entry of the new traveler registry, which since yesterday, hotels, travel agencies and other companies in the sector, imposes a significant bureaucratic burden, as they have been denouncing in recent months. «The Government has come up with a Royal Decree without consulting companies when they always show off public-private collaboration. But with us, zero collaboration,” denounced this Tuesday the president of the association, Juan Molas, who described the measure as “very bad news for the sector.”
There are around 42 pieces of information – between 50 and 60 according to the Tourism Board depending on the subsector – that companies must provide to the Ministry of the Interior since yesterday, when before they only sent 14. The organization finds it “nonsense” taking into account that Some data are impossible to verify by the establishments. “We have no way of checking if the usual address that the client tells us is the correct one, if it is not the one on the DNI,” explained the general secretary of the Tourism Board, Carlos Abella, during a meeting with the media. communication, who has also denounced the risks of keeping guest data for three yearsyes -as requested by the decree- when the majority of the affected companies are SMEs “and do not have the necessary resources to store this data, when cybercrime is common.”
To make matters worse, as this newspaper announced, the platform where the SES data is entered. Lodgings were down for much of the day yesterday. “Yesterday the establishments could not enter the data and for many agencies the antivirus did not allow them to enter the platform because they detected it as insecure.”
In addition to the administrative overload, Abella has denounced the damage it will cause to the operations of establishments such as hotels. “Check in will take 15 minutes when before it was 5 and when a group of 50 people arrive it will be unfeasible.” Furthermore, the representative of the sector has assured that Spain is the only European country that requests this data and that this has already been echoed by the press in the United Kingdom, the country that contributes the most tourists to Spain. “We have missed the support of the Ministry of Tourism,” said Abella.
National demand drop
Beyond the new traveler registry, the Tourism Board also detects some drawbacks for the sector, which they assure is experiencing a sweet moment. One of them is national demand, which has been showing signs of exhaustion for months and is collapsing in some Spanish destinations, as ABC already reported. “In the last three months, national demand does not have the same strength as it did in 2023 and in the first months of 2024. There has been a certain recession and we have to analyze it,” detailed President Molas, who specified that September has been better than July for the national tourist and that there has not been a movement of clients from the south to the north of the peninsula.
Molas has reasoned the situation due to the rise in prices, “in many cases, very justified because there have been very important increases such as that of food and that of collective agreements, which has been between 4 and 5.5%, above that of other sectors». However, the leader of the Tourism Board has announced that the reserves for the Constitution bridge “are working very well.”
The association predicts a 2025 in line with 2024, although special attention is also being paid to the conflicts in the Middle East and, above all, Russia and Ukraine, which may affect the Nordic market, which is very important for Spanish tourism. “In countries like Norway, Sweden or Finland they are expressing concern, although in the face of winter demand is responding in a preferential destination such as the Canary Islands,” Molas stated.
Hospitality schools do not cover registration fees
With these wicks, the tourism industry predicts that tourism in 2024 will reach a turnover of over 200,000 million euros and will account for 13% of Direct GDP. Molas has also highlighted that the affiliation of workers in the sector will close the year at close to 2.8 million euros and that in 2025 the aim is to exceed 3 million, despite the difficulties that companies continue to show in finding qualified labor. at some times of the year. «Hospitality and tourism schools are not covering all tuition in recent years. We have to focus on finding solutions so that young people see us as a professional alternative. “It is the sector that provides the greatest economic and social stability to Spain,” requested the president of the Tourism Board.
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