The Diplomat
The Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, announced yesterday that Spain will launch a pilot project to test the suitability of the health passport, in an attempt to normalize international travel before the arrival of summer. In addition, she received the German ambassador to Spain, Wolfgang Dold, to discuss the reactivation of tourism.
Germany has traditionally been the second largest outbound tourism market for Spain, behind only the United Kingdom, but figures have plummeted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the latest data from the Statistics on Tourist Movements at Borders (FRONTUR), published a month ago by the National Statistics Institute (INE), tourist arrivals from Germany fell by 78.4% in 2020 and spending by German tourists fell by 77.5%.
The meeting between Maroto and the ambassador, which also addressed “the strengthening of collaboration in the industrial field, especially in the automotive and aeronautics” -according to the Twitter account of the Ministry-, took place a few days before the virtual celebration of the ITB Berlin, the leading fair of the world tourism industry, and a few days after Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that her Government will avoid German travel during Easter. Last February 26, the German Embassy launched a campaign on social networks, called #Volveremos, which collects the testimonies of German citizens who wish to return to Spain.
One of the hopes of the Spanish government to try to recover tourism is for the EU to implement vaccination certificates, an idea that faces the reluctance of several countries, including Germany itself. Last February 25, the European Council called for “further work on a common approach on vaccination certificates” and pledged to “revisit this issue”, and a few days later Maroto herself asked the European Commission to speed up the vaccination certificate, in line with a proposal defended that same day by the Tourism Ministers of Spain, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Malta and Slovakia in a joint statement sent to the Commission.
To advance in this matter, Reyes Maroto took advantage yesterday of her intervention in a conference organized by the tourism lobby Exceltur to announce to the media that Spain is going to carry out “a pilot test” to test the suitability of the digital mobility certificate and whose development will be expedited from the inter-ministerial commission constituted this past Wednesday and chaired by the head of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez. “We want to be ready to use the digital certificate as soon as the incidence of the virus allows it”, added the minister. “For the Government it is key to have the technological tools available to put Spain and Europe back as a safe travel destination”, she added. The pilot test will make it possible to detect possible deficiencies of the certificate before its possible approval in the EU as a whole and for the moment the dates have not been determined (“we are working on it”, she specified) nor the places in Spain where the tests will be carried out.
