SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 18 Oct. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Canary Islands will host the 1st European Convention on Tourist Islands at the end of this year, a meeting that was born with the aim of designing and proposing to the European Union a common investment plan for these territories and which aims to make the Canary Islands the protagonist of the new policy European tourist.
The Convention, which will be held from November 30 to December 2 at the Maspalomas Conference Center in Gran Canaria, has been organized by the Ministry of Tourism, Industry and Commerce of the Government of the Canary Islands, together with the Association for Research , the Study and Excellence of the Tourism Sector in the Canary Islands (Excelcan), recently established.
To discuss the details of this Convention, the president of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, met this Tuesday at the headquarters of the Presidency of the Government in Santa Cruz de Tenerife with the president of the Association for Research, Study and Excellence in Tourism Sector in the Canary Islands (Excelcan), Santiago de Armas, and with members of said organization of entrepreneurs related to tourism.
Ángel Víctor Torres thanked Excelcan for both its constitution and the organization of the First European Convention of Tourist Islands, which “will coincide with a series of anniversaries and different initiatives that will place the Canary Islands in a relevant place in the international arena, as it is the next summit of the OECD or the Presidency of the RUP, which the Canary Islands will assume in Brussels next November”.
Torres also highlighted that the European Convention of Tourist Islands is “a very important meeting to project the tourist strengths of the Canary Islands and also to show, together with other tourist islands, where we have to go in this fundamental area for the economy of the Canary Islands “.
For his part, the president of Excelcan stressed that the Convention aims to contribute to the Canary Islands being the protagonist of the new European tourism policy and hopes that all European island territories can participate in this event, since at least half of the countries that make up the EU have island territories.
The I Convention of European Tourist Islands will be divided into three panels, the first of which will focus on European tourism policy; the second, on digitization, and, finally, the third on the opportunities and risks of sustainability.
The target audience of this joint initiative of the Government of the Canary Islands and Excelcan is, in addition to the different authorities, the European tourist islands themselves, that is, those islands or archipelagos of a minimum economic and territorial dimension in which tourism is the fundamental sector of its economy.
THE EUROPEAN TOURIST ISLANDS
According to the typology established by Eurostat in 2018, in the EU of 27 there are 61 island regions that correspond to 11 countries and represent a population of 20.5 million inhabitants, which represents 4.6% of the total of the European Union .
According to the same source, the Canary Islands are the leading island region in the EU in terms of the number of overnight stays, with more than 96 million, followed by the Balearic Islands, with 68 million, while, in terms of tourist beds, the Balearic Islands rank first place, with more than 467,000 beds, followed closely by the Canary Islands (429,222).
In absolute terms, and in the absence of data from Cyprus, Greece and Ireland, the islands with the highest number of companies in the tourism sector are Mallorca (9,119), Tenerife (8,423) and Gran Canaria (6,133), while those with the lowest number of tourist companies are El Hierro (133), Bornholm (222), Aland (226) and La Gomera (322).
Excelcan opens as an association for the search for excellence in tourism in the Canary Islands, with the organization, together with the Ministry of Tourism, of the I Convention of European Tourist Islands.
Excelcan was born with the purpose of promoting research, study and exposure of the different problems of the tourism sector, in addition to providing the tools to try to solve them. As a strategy, all kinds of collaborative relationships will be carried out with analogous or similar entities, at a local, state and international level, with the aim of exchanging experiences and knowledge in the field of tourism.
From an organizational point of view, Excelcan is currently made up of ten of the most important tourism companies in the Canary Islands, which are made up of Canarian capital and where decision-making is exercised on the islands, regardless of whether they have establishments outside the Canary Islands. .
