SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, December 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Hotel and Extra-hotel Association of Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro, Ashotel, warns this Thursday the Government of Spain of the “destruction” that will cause in the Canary Islands, in the middle of high season, the restriction that is applied to tourists and that It requires a complete vaccination schedule for minors between the ages of 12 and 17.
The employer recalls in a note that it already warned on December 1, the date of entry into force of Order INT / 1304/2021, of November 26, of the Ministry of the Interior, which modified the current criteria of temporary restriction of travel not essential (tourist) and that especially affects the British market due to the situation, in terms of vaccination, in which minors between 12 and 17 years of that nationality are found.
The proximity to the Christmas summer period already causes a significant cancellation of reservations on the islands, which in Tenerife can be estimated at around 40% and the British tour operator Jet2.com has decided to cancel its operations with Spain until after January 10.
The president of Ashotel and of the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation (CEHAT), Jorge Marichal, assured this Wednesday during the election ceremony of the new Board of Directors of the Federation of Hotel Employers of Mallorca (FEHM) that he did not understand “by what “a 13-year-old Austrian child can come to Spain with an antigen test and a 13-year-old British child cannot with an antigen and a dose of the vaccine.
“If something is clear to me, it is that the virus does not understand borders, nor laws, nor politics,” he said.
After a year of vaccination against COVID-19 in Spain, with one of the highest coverage rates in all of Europe, Marichal considers that the same measures and restrictions that were applied then cannot be applied and insisted that health security it will always be above it, but the economy also has to keep going.
“The hoteliers have not been suspected of not complying with the imposed measures, what is more, we were pioneers throughout the State in the coordinated development in record time of a series of protocols that we have applied in our establishments,” he said.
Along these lines, he asks himself: “Now that we are in the middle of the high season, why do we have to lose thousands of reservations on the islands due to a decision that really meets political criteria?”
He also stated that the traffic light levels that are applied on each Canary Island, depending on the health pressure due to COVID-19 infections, have been a useful instrument.
THE SPOTLIGHTS ARE NOT IN HOTEL ENVIRONMENTS
However, he insists that the outbreaks are occurring in environments that have nothing to do with hotel establishments and considers that putting more obstacles to accommodation activity will not protect the Canary Islands from infections that are not in that hotel environment.
The hotel management, Marichal stresses, has supported from the first moment the request for a COVID certificate, a tool that is finally voluntary in the Canary Islands, but that allows establishments that request it to apply the measures of capacity and hours of a lower level than the one that every island is found at every moment.
Hotel establishments, in fact, were pioneers in the archipelago in requesting that control from their guests at the entrance to their facilities, a request that for almost a year was regulated by decree 17/2020 of the Government of the Canary Islands that regulates the conditions of access to tourist establishments on the islands, currently on hold, he says.
