The objective of this San Francisco-based company is to observe how the market responds to its landing in Tenerife during the months of June, July, August and September and then, based on the data collected, decide if the company’s expansion is appropriate. both to new Tenerife municipalities and to the rest of the Islands. It was last June when Uber began to offer Taxi and Uber Black services in the South of Tenerife while last week they enabled their new vehicle services for group travel, Uber Van for up to 6 people and Van XL for up to 9 passengers.
In turn, Zayas rejects that it is the limitations of the councils and Town Halls those that are causing a problem for the company when it comes to expanding in Canary Islands. It should be remembered that Law 13/2007 on Road Transport of the Archipelago established in 2014 the obligation to maintain the ratio of approving only one VTC license for every 30 urban taxi authorizations. Precisely because of the Canary Islands Transport standard, the Council of Gran Canaria confirms having rejected more than 3,400 requests for VTC licences.
Taxi drivers celebrate the break
The opinion of the taxi sector is very different regarding the lack of penetration of VTCs in the Canary Islands passenger transport market. The president of the Regional Federation of Canary Islands Taxis (Fedetax), Juan Artiles, assures that there is no other reason behind the brake on the expansion of companies like Uber in the Archipelago beyond “the resistance and opposition of the taxi sector ». In fact, he remembers that in the Canary Islands more than 6,000 authorizations have been requested by companies that want to operate with vehicles with a driver and, given these figures, he asks: “Who believes that, if all these licenses are accepted, the platforms of VTC would they refuse to enter the rest of the Islands?
For Artiles, the response of the island’s public institutions to the requests for licenses by the chauffeur-driven vehicle companies “adjusts” to the Canary Islands Highway Transport Law as well as to different Supreme Court rulings that “have given the reason to the Islands in its ratio of a VTC vehicle for every 30 taxis ».
The concern of the sector before the arrival of the VTC is a matter of figures. Those 6,000 requests for licenses could “put at risk” the 10,000 families who live on taxis in the Canary Islands. To prevent this from happening, Artiles believes that the union of the sector has also been a differential factor in the Archipelago with respect to the rest of the national territory, where “practically unlimited authorizations have been given.”
In this sense, the president of Fedetax assures that the VTCs “have only entered Tenerife with those 30 licenses” because the taxi drivers themselves “have not wanted to start working with them.” And this, despite the fact that they offer conditions such as a 0% service commission to taxi drivers who register on their mobile application until August 31, 300 euros for each recommendation and 150 euros for completing the first 25 journeys.
All this is for Artiles a sign that companies like Uber are indifferent to allying with entities like Ares Capital –which has the largest number of VTC licenses in Spain– than with other taxi drivers: «Uber is a platform that the only thing What matters to him is managing reservations and offering a service and then charging a commission to the client and another to the taxi driver.
While the taxi sector “is standing firm” in its opposition to the VTC platforms and has been “sitting down with the Government for a year to comply with the regulations”, others “affected” by the arrival of chauffeur-driven vehicles ” They reject the platforms but with small mouths. And it is that for Artiles, the companies dedicated to discretionary transport or merchandise, which operate “legally” in the Canary Islands, “have barely mobilized” but work “behind” to try to make decisions “align” with their interests.
However, Artiles points out that one of the objectives of the sector is “to sit down with the new team of the Government of the Canary Islands» since, to date, they have not had the opportunity to meet the new Director General of Transport: «We are concerned about the attitude they may have regarding this problem, although we have the word of the Executive that the situation is going to be fixed. And what we don’t want either is to give more room to those who are not fighting.
Apart from the discrepancies with the VTC licences, the taxi drivers also urge the municipalities to expedite the exams that give access to the card that allows taxi drivers to work because after the pandemic “the machinery was degreased” and now the sector is experiencing a “lack of workers”. This is “fundamental” in a context of rising tourism in which they transport ten million users a year.
