Boozy British tourists on budget package holidays can expect a cooler reception in the holiday hotspot of Lanzarote, as the Canary island joins a growing number of Spanish destinations trying to take their hospitality industry upmarket.
Lanzarote's tourist chiefs have signalled an end to the budget tourism that has seen Britons be its most frequent visitors for many years, the Mirror reports. Instead, they will focus on wooing travellers, including Germans, who want a higher-quality holiday.
The island has declared itself a “tourist-saturated area”. And its new strategy aims to “reduce dependence on the British market.
María Dolores Corujo, the Socialist party president of Lanzarote’s local government, told a tourism trade fair in Berlin: “It’s essential to work on the diversification of the [tourism] sector and the growth of markets like the German market . . . and [drawing] holidaymakers who spend more when they’re here and [moving] us away from mass tourism.”
Part of the new strategy will be to become less dependent on Britons, who currently account for more than half of the island's holidaymakers. And Lanzarote is not the only part of Spain that is making moves to change the way its tourism industry operates.
Tourism leaders in Mallorca have just introduced a policy to allow no more than three cruise ships a day to dock in the island capital of Palma. And the director of tourism for the Balearic island, Lucia Escribano, said it was "not interested in having budget tourists from the UK".
Meanwhile, the government of the Balearic Islands has announced they will have an "absolute ceiling" when it comes to tourist numbers in the future. It will be set at 16,475,579, the total number of visitors the island group welcome last year.
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To cut down on boozy bad behaviour, the Balearics have also limited the number of drinks holidaymakers can have on all-inclusive deals to six a day.
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