With tourism once again breaking historical records of affluence and turnover in the Canary Islands and growing social pressure to put some kind of limit on it, it is almost dystopian to think of islands without tourists, but it happened just five years ago, in the middle of the high season.
Although the pandemic had been warning for weeks before, even with an entire hotel in quarantine in Tenerife, it was after the declaration of the state of alarm when the sector had to organize the hasty return to their country of tens of thousands of European tourists.
It was March, one of those months that always end in the Canary Islands with more than one million tourists and for the first time in its history the sector faced a zero. Just one month later, during Easter week, almost 200,000 workers in the sector and dependent activities, 25% of the entire workforce of the islands, were at home, in a temporary employment regulation file (ERTE).
"Perplexed"
The first memory that comes to Jorge Marichal's mind, president of the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation (CEHAT) and of the Tenerife employers' association Ashotel, is that "nobody expected" that outbreak of the pandemic precisely in La Gomera and then in the H10 hotel in Adeje (Tenerife). "We were all perplexed."
The sector had gone through difficulties "but we had never thought that a virus could leave us with a tourist zero", with an uncertain panorama in which "we did not know where we had to go", with a "quite tense" situation that was resolved with a "very good" crisis management and "lifesaving" measures that kept the tourist activity in lethargy to be able to get out "fast, no, immediately".
The lesson is that "anything can happen and everything can change in a minute", says Marichal, who is "sad and afraid" that it seems that situation has been forgotten, because "things are going well, but at any moment they can stop going well".
Victoria López, president of Grupo Fedola, a family business with 100% Canarian capital that owns the GF Hoteles chain, with five establishments in Tenerife, maintains that the pandemic revealed the "unity" as a community of the more than 1,100 employees of the group.
But in the first moments there was uncertainty, fear and anguish, even panic, among the hotel clients who were struggling to find a place on the planes back to their countries and returned crying to the hotel if they did not succeed, she recalls.
Victoria López still keeps a photograph of herself in which she is sitting on the steps of the pool with her hands on her head reflecting on the uncertain future.
The hotels reopened when there was still no air traffic
When the de-escalation finally arrived, her hotels were among the first to open their doors, only to have to close them again because "there were 900 places and one hundred tourists" due to the lack of connectivity, she comments now with better humor than in those moments, from which she has extracted the lesson that "people want experiences" in their lives and will continue to travel.
Onalia Bueno, mayor of Mogán, in the south of Gran Canaria, also admits to having been in 'shock' the first day she saw the streets of her municipality, the hotels and the shopping centers completely empty: "It was a terrifying panorama".
She highlights how the coordinated work of the administrations and the hoteliers ensured that the evacuation of the tourist complexes was carried out with the greatest possible order.
But despite the zero, the "machinery" never stopped. Both the tourist business community and the City Council worked to adapt, modernize and improve and many works were awarded.
Inertias that have left "coldness" in the treatment
Enrique Talg, director of the Hotel Tigaiga and the Tigaiga Suites apartments in Puerto de la Cruz, only remembers the uncertainty that afflicted the sector and the improvisation in measures that have later become structural, such as disinfection, but that have also brought a certain "coldness" in the treatment of the client.
Efficiency has been gained but spontaneity in the treatment has been lost, continues Talg, who gives as an example asking for the order at the restaurant through a QR code, when before tourists even appealed to the waiter by name.
For Pedro David Díaz, owner of the rural house Las Vigas in Arico, Tourism Award of the Canary Islands, the pandemic "was a catharsis, an emotional shock" that impacted in the middle of the high season with the accommodation full and suddenly they had to manage the departure of the clients and return reservations already collected.
It was "a blow, horrible months" for an accommodation located in a scattered rural area that generated the anguish of possible robberies, so he used "the trick" of going to maintain a nearby vineyard to spend a few days in the rural house with his family and thus find "an escape valve, a relief when it was said that everything was contaminated".
And when it began to open with restrictions, rural tourism became the preferred option and "a swarm of people arrived, there was no empty rural house, a boom" that has continued. However, Díaz fears that this situation is "a mirage" and hopes that a pandemic will not occur again, which would be "a very strong disaster".