The Association of Economists of Las Palmas warned this Friday that the bill that the regional Executive intends to take to Parliament will contribute to generating more poverty in Canarian society and will affect the tourism sector as a whole, and understands that it is not "sufficiently argued".
These are the conclusions drawn by the collegiate body based on data from a report it has prepared on the economic reality of vacation homes in the archipelago, from which it appears that 89% of those who exploit them are small or medium-sized owners, holding between one and four properties of this type, rejecting that the Government of the Canary Islands only considers a "small holder" to be someone who has a single vacation home.
In a press conference to present this report, the economist Rosa Rodríguez, coordinator of the same, pointed out that this regulation that is intended to be approved in the Parliament of the Canary Islands should "contemplate the interests of small and medium-sized owners".
She alluded to the fact that exploiting these homes for tourist rentals brings them income that, in many cases, allows them to make ends meet, so, "as the Canarian economy is, which is getting worse and worse, if you take away a part of their livelihood from this type of owners, what will become of the Canarian economy?" she asked.
Rodríguez acknowledged that she does not understand "where this decision" of the Government of the Canary Islands to draft a law that she has described as "practically a tourist moratorium" comes from, and assured that it is not "sufficiently argued", as evidenced in her opinion by the data that appears in the report.
Based on them, obtained mostly by the Experimental Statistics of Vacation Housing prepared by the Canarian Institute of Statistics (ISTAC), vacation housing has become a differentiated market niche within the tourist offer that makes the archipelago available to visitors.
In this way, vacation homes represent 34% of the total places available in the Canary Islands, well above the traditional extra-hotel places -19.45%- and approaching 46.5% of hotels, and which are even higher in the case of those municipalities that are not touristy -where tourist rentals represent two thirds of their total offer-.
In addition, the contribution of tourist spending in vacation homes to the total GDP of the Canary Islands has been gradually increasing since 2019 to stand at around 3% at the end of this year, which is equivalent to 7.68% of the tourist GDP of the islands.
This weight in the GDP, the economists have highlighted, doubles that of the primary sector -1.49%- and is just over five tenths greater than that of the manufacturing sector -2.47%-.
Going into the detail of how vacation home users spend in relation to hotel users, the Association of Economists of Las Palmas has warned of very different trends, to the point that, excluding spending on accommodation and national or international transport, those who choose tourist rentals are the ones who spend the most money outside their places of accommodation.
Thus, more than half of the spending that vacation home customers make at their destination is on local transport, supermarkets, restaurants and cafeterias, leisure, purchase of goods -souvenirs, handicrafts- and other tourist expenses, for just under 21% of the total that those staying in hotels spend on these issues.
The bill "is not justified"
"With these data that we have provided in two reports, the law is not justified," concluded Rosa Rodríguez, who remarked that the vast majority of vacation homes that currently exist in the archipelago "are converted apartments and villas" -up to 80% in the case of tourist municipalities-.
That is why she has asked how the Canarian Government and the island councils "have allowed these apartments and villas to be registered as vacation homes", which contravenes current regulations.
"By enforcing the current regulations, this law would not be necessary," she added, and then added that it is necessary to sit down "to combine all interests", since vacation home owners claim that they earn more by advertising it directly on a portal than by putting these resources in a unit of exploitation.
In her opinion, what cannot be done is "punish vacation home owners", because in this way, and with the data that the Association of Economists has presented in hand, "the sector as a whole would be attacked", since the population that opts for tourist rentals will not go to hotels if they do not find accommodation options.
