Spain - how to cut your own throat

[dewaltdisney]

Having just returned from a couple of weeks in Mallorca I was more concerned by the Microsoft outage but our travel was exceptionally smooth both ways. There was an anti-tourist demonstration planned for Sunday but there was nothing around Palma airport that I saw. It was the same when we went to Gran Canaria earlier this year and I had it down to a bit of fake news drumming things up for clicks. However, my newspaper today showed a huge demo in Palma, and if you consider the facts I have a degree of sympathy for the island young but it also is a huge own goal.

I was talking to a Spanish resident worker at the hotel and she was telling me that accommodation is the key issue. Many workers have around 6 months of employment a year as the tourist industry supports so many of them. Rents are very high and are an average of 700 euros a month for a small apartment. This is because any remotely attractive accommodation is used by owners as a holiday let to get more income. This is only mainly coastal areas and the island residents who live in typical residential zones feel the effect as the rents have risen as a result of tourist and transient workers' rents. A lot of workers flood in from the EU to work the summer as most of the tourist-related jobs are hard to fill.

When you look at all the people working in these jobs, and the tourist tax income generated, we paid around £62 for two weeks, the Island's economy cannot do without tourism and there has to be a compromise. The Spanish authorities must act to stop the housing system being abused. As it is, there are so many foreign-owned dwellings that remain empty for most of the year, and new housing zones on the periphery of towns should be created with covenants preventing sale to anyone but residents or rental agreements for workers only.

Putting tourists off will see them move off to more welcoming resorts leaving them in poverty.

Wise up chumps, see the whole picture, you need us and the Germans.

DWD

[Neelix]

The same is real in the UK. Too many “seaside” homes being let for making money pricing the local’s out. The simple answer is a licensing scheme with a cap on how many rentals can operate in the area.