When the state of alarm is lifted, it is expected that it will take about three months to complete the total reopening of the tourism sector.
The Canary Islands tourism sector estimates losses of 4.2 billion euros due to the cessation of activity and the slow recovery with which the opening of its establishments will occur, once the state of alarm decreed by the coronavirus pandemic ends.
As indicated by the president of the Canary Confederation of Entrepreneurs (CCE), the employers of the province of Las Palmas, Agustín Manrique de Lara, it is expected that when the state of alarm is lifted it will take about three months to complete the total reopening of the tourism sector , because airplanes and sending countries will also be activated gradually.
Manrique de Lara has indicated that there is not yet a calculation on the impact of this crisis on jobs, although he recalled that this sector employs more than 100,000 people on the islands and that the temporary employment regulation files (ERTE) are generalized by the “tourist zero”.
You should know the incidence of the minimum services that companies have set , as well as the real impact of the temporary employment regulation (ERTE) files once the processing process is closed, he added.
In the Canary Islands, it has continued, 15,109 ERTE have been presented but there is no detailed data on companies and workers in the tourism sector, which must be provided by the Canary Islands Government as it analyzes the files, he pointed out.
Manrique de Lara has stressed that when the state of alarm is lifted, the recovery of employment will be gradual as well, and therefore there will have to be flexibility in the rules to preserve the business fabric and jobs.
According to the CCE president, at the moment it is “impossible” to know with certainty the companies that will be lost in this process.
“But we have no doubt that bringing income to zero will leave part of the productive fabric out of the process, it is inevitable,” he said, both in the tourism sector and in the rest, so measures are needed to address the situation.
As for those adopted last Sunday by the Council of Ministers to restrict economic activity to only essential services, he commented that he is awaiting the new meeting that the Government is holding and has hoped that the measures agreed upon this Tuesday are “correct”.
Manrique de Lara has emphasized that it is necessary for the consensus to recover before the attitude of the central government, “we need to be all together”, politicians, businessmen and social agents.
The Government must work in this direction and have the support of the groups that support it – after distancing itself from its measures, the PNV – and the parties that make up the opposition, he indicated.
He insisted that consensus is “key” to get out of this health, economic and social crisis quickly and has valued the response of the Canary Islands Government.
