Fitur and the Taxi-drivers

The FITUR is currently running in Madrid (through Sunday). This is the second largest travel fair in the world, after the ITB German one, and brings 250,000 people to visit and do some business with over 10,000 exhibitors – countries, regions, resorts, companies and experts. It’s been going since 1980 and is housed on the edge of the city in the Ifema buildings.

Which brings a problem this year – the Madrid taxi-drivers are on strike and they have decided to blockade the site, to make it all a bit more irritating (see here) and thus the King had to enter Wednesday by a side-door to open the fair (here). In short: chaos at Fitur (tourism being the main money-spinner for Spain: thanks, taxi-drivers!). The taxi-drivers want more of their pie, and are noisily campaigning against the VTC cars from Uber and Cabify – indeed those two companies have threatened to withdraw from Barcelona on the back of a savage taxi-strike there – with the added loss of 3,500 jobs.

Spain is very partial to tourism, with 81,200,000 foreign visitors in 2018, leaving behind a satisfying amount of money (estimated as an ‘associated spend of 89,400 million euros’) as they returned to their own countries. The country also employs, in some way related to tourism, some 2.8 million people.

Spain also saw a huge number of national tourists who took a few days or weeks off work to visit their old pueblo, or stay in a hotel or with friends. The numbers seem too hard to work out, but are thought to be impressive.

Tourism may have hit its upper limit, with 2018 figures actually slightly down on 2017 by 0.8%. Still more than enough says those of us who don’t run a souvenir business or a hotel or who live in a barrio overflowing with Airbnb operations.

The Brexit may serve to slow things down in 2019. We read that ‘...The numbers speak for themselves. In 2018 Spain attracted 17.6 million British visitors. That’s 22% of the 80 million foreign tourists that visited the country, according to Exceltur. While the number was down by over a million on 2017’s record haul of 18.8 million British visitors, it still dwarfed the number of visitors from second-placed Germany (11.8 million) and third-placed France (10.8 million)...’.

Another Brexit headache is the potential problem with Iberia and Vueling which are either British or Spanish – depending on circumstance. Being British would knock them both out of the European skies. ‘...If the current legislation is not changed or a new loophole inserted into it, Iberia and Vueling’s European fleet could find themselves grounded in 70 days’ time. As absurd as it may sound, even planes shuttling between Spain’s two biggest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, could be refused permission to take off...’.

Spain knows full well that there are other places for a holiday. Without disease, terrorism or major incidents (things which could also occur here),’... Last year’s slowdown was also accentuated by the “marked recovery” of cheaper rival destinations in the Eastern Mediterranean such as Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. According to Exceltur, these three countries alone attracted 12.5 million more tourists last year...’. Now we have perhaps reached our upper limit, we need to work hard to stay where we are (thanks, taxi-drivers!).

Longer quotes in this article come from Wolf Street here.