The Generalitat (Catalan Government) has decided that the increase in the tax on stays in tourist establishments (the "tourist tax"), agreed upon by the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and the Comuneros (Commonwealth Party), will be processed as a bill. The ERC (Spanish Workers' Party) demanded this in order to introduce amendments, arguing that the bill treated sun and beach tourism like that of Barcelona, when the reality is very different. This is true, but what is not so clear is what our sun and beach tourism needs. I will try to answer this question.
However, it's important to remember that tourist demand has proven completely insensitive to the tax. This was the case in 2013, when it was introduced throughout Catalonia, and it has done so again in Barcelona when it doubled. In both cases, demand has continued to grow at extraordinarily high rates. The reason is simply that the tax represents a tiny proportion of tourists' budgets.
The starting point for analysis must be the observation that sun and beach tourism is, in Catalonia, an important sector—on the order of 6% of GDP—but very unproductive: if the Basque Country's economy is 17% more productive than Catalonia's, this is due to the importance of sun and beach tourism in our country, given that Barcelona's sun and beach industries.
The reason why Catalan sun and beach tourism is so unproductive is its seasonality, as its productive assets—infrastructure, accommodation, services, and, above all, personnel—must remain idle for most of the year.
Traditionally, the goal has been to combat seasonality by stimulating off-season demand. This strategy has failed because it couldn't succeed. The reasonable strategy is the opposite: reducing capacity below peak demand—that of August. In fact, scaling infrastructure, accommodations, and services to meet demand for three or four weeks a year is an extravagance that can only be described as irrational. It entails the need to attract a mass of low-skilled temporary staff each year who have difficulty finding housing, and a dependence on tour operators to fill some weeks: from an economic, environmental, and tourist experience perspective, as they find themselves in an environment that is either oversaturated or deserted.
The strategy of limiting capacity below maximum potential demand has been fortuitously tested, and with great success, in Barcelona, where hoteliers would like to build more hotels and homeowners want to transform more of their properties into tourist accommodation (HUT), but where regulations do not allow it. The result is extremely low seasonality (only five months below 90% and none below 60%), stable and therefore professional workforces, and extremely high economic performance (one of the highest in Europe).
Reducing the capacity of sun and sand would have been an aberration in the second half of the 20th century, when we were facing persistent unemployment; in those circumstances, seasonal work was better than no work at all. Now, what we face is a structural staff shortage that will increase as we retire. boomersIn fact, since 2000, all the jobs created by Catalan tourism have had to be filled by immigrants. Obviously, what's an aberration now is attracting immigrants by having to support them for most of the year at the expense of the public purse.
That there is no alternative plan has been made clear by the employers' association Exceltur, which last year proposed the Coastal Tourism Plan 2030 to respond to the "challenge of generating greater overall value" with proposals as insubstantial as "the creation of a commissioner for the regeneration of sun and beach tourism" or the launch of an international ideas competition for the "comprehensive redevelopment of two to five pioneering destinations."
Reducing the capacity of the Catalan sun and beach resort means demolishing obsolete hotels and apartment blocks to convert them into public spaces and compensating owners for eliminating HUT licenses, among other measures. All of this requires a plan, time, and money, and the latter is what the tourist tax should provide.
The agreement to raise the tourist tax has put tourism entrepreneurs on a war footing, but resizing the sector is the best option for them as well. We hope common sense prevails.
