Tourism is more concerned about sustainability and the need for the sector to adapt to this commitment than about the crisis motivated by rising costs, inflation and the geopolitical situation.
The experts who met this week in Lloret de Mar in the BTM tourist forumorganized by the Climent Guitart Foundation and the EFE Agency, have agreed to reduce the significance of these current difficulties and to focus on the obligation to contribute to the environmental fight, even if also from a social level.
An authorized voice such as that of the former minister and former president of Vueling Josep Piqué spoke along these lines. He showed his conviction that “inflation must begin to decline, slowly next year and, from 2024, returning to between 2 and 4% depending on the country. In any case, he admitted that “bad times are coming”, but pointed out that “not terrible”, and urged to have a “strategic mentality to go beyond the immediate future”.
For Piqué, tourism, sustainability and commitment to quality will be two of the keys to the future of a sector that “has many years ahead of it”, although he acknowledged that “it will suffer from the fall in global demand , inflation and geopolitical uncertainties»
“Tourism will suffer from the drop in global demand, inflation and geopolitical uncertainties”
In another outstanding panel of the day, small and medium-sized companies took the lead in a debate led by the president of Pimec, Antoni Cañete, alongside the directors of Eurecat and CaixaBank Hotels and Tourism, Xavier López Luján and David Rico, and Turijobs business-directed marketing manager, Yisel Viña.
Moderated by the general director of the EFE Agency in Catalonia, Leandro Lamor, the message was also along the lines of prioritizing the achievement of sustainability in the tourism sector in the face of current economic situations.
David Rico specified perspectives such as inflation to be 4.5 percent next year and 2.2 percent in 2024, and he assured that he would “take away some fear of what is happening.”
Rico also does not foresee serious energy supply problems for the next two years and places the recovery towards the second half of 2024.
Antoni Cañete spoke especially about sustainability from the point of view of labor relations, which he believes must be made more flexible in tourism, and asked that companies have access to information to undertake their transformation processes.
Lack of talent
Cañete also insisted on the lack of talent in the sector, with problems completing templates, and Xavier López Luján stressed that “the professions must be respected”.
In a talk in the form of an interview, the president of the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodations (CEHAT), Jorge Marichal, brought this lack of labor to the sustainable field and emphasized that employees must have housing near their jobs.
Marichal highlighted that the high prices of flats and houses in tourist areas mean that “in Ibiza, policemen and doctors have no place to sleep”.
“In the Canary Islands, a place I know well, there is 15 percent unemployment, we can’t find people to work and we can’t be talking about structural unemployment,” he indicated.
Cost increase
From the figures of the summer, the president of CEHAT has come to figure the increase in energy costs “between 200 and 300 percent”, which led to an average hotel seeing its bill increase “by 10,000 or 12,000 euros to between 30,000 and 40,000».
“The food also increased by 14 or 15 percent and, in the end, the total increase in costs is between 25 and 30 percent”, added Jorge Marichal.
The day, which began with the welcome and opening speeches in this line of commitment to sustainability as the key to the future, also included a conference on the role of women in tourism and a panel on the Climent Chair guitar
Subsequently, the metaverse took center stage to shed light on the future of this technology in the tourism business and, finally, the mayor of Lloret de Mar, Jaume Dulsat, and the president of the Diputació de Girona, Miquel Noguer, close the forum