Jorge Marichal, a Spanish hotelier, breathed a sigh of relief after the UK and Germany opened up travel corridors to the Canary Islands, throwing a lifeline to a sun-soaked archipelago heavily reliant on winter tourism.
“The news is very positive, but we have to take things calmly,” said Marichal, who runs hotels and apartment complexes on the islands of Tenerife and La Gomera. “We hope all our customers will return and leave happy and healthy with a good sun tan.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid waste to the Spanish tourism industry, which has seen foreign visitor numbers slump by almost three-quarters in the year through August.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The UK and Germany easing travel to the Canary Islands gives the archipelago the chance to salvage some of its business supplying northern Europeans with a dose of winter sunshine.
The UK on Thursday announced that it would no longer make Britons returning from the region undergo two weeks of quarantine.
That requirement remains in force for the rest of Spain, where virus cases have surged back to peak levels and hospitalizations are rising.
The lifting of British restrictions took effect yesterday. The decision followed a similar move by Germany.
The good news for the Canaries is a rare ray of sunshine in a bleak year for Spain as it struggles to contain the virus and its effects on its tourism industry, which accounts for more than 10 percent of the economy.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Friday said that more than 3 million people in Spain have caught COVID-19, a figure about three times higher than official data, and the government is mulling new restrictions to try to tame the spread.
The Canaries — a chain of several islands far closer to the Western Sahara than to mainland Spain — have been relatively unscathed by the virus, although the local economy has been devastated by the economic effects of travel restrictions.
On Tenerife, only about one-fifth of the island’s hotels are open and those that are have an occupancy rate of just 15 to 20 percent, said Marichal, who is chairman of Ashotel, the industry association for the island, and three others including La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro.
About 750 hotels serve visitors to the Canaries, according to the regional government’s Web site.
Marichal was hopeful that the pickup in business would mean he could soon welcome tourists again to the two hotels he runs on Tenerife that have been closed since March.
The easing of restrictions on travel from the UK and Germany, the islands’ two biggest markets, could help salvage some of the key Christmas season in an archipelago that boasts average temperatures of about 21°C in December.
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