The debate that mayor Ada Colau opened almost a year ago about limiting the number of cruise ships that Barcelona receives in order to reduce the excessive negative impacts that, in her opinion, they generate – pollution and agglomerations – is still alive, and will most certainly be a prominent theme of the 28-M campaign. In this context, the shipping association (CLIA) yesterday presented a study commissioned by professors from the University of Barcelona (UB) in which a large part of these pernicious effects and the contribution of this activity segment to municipal coffers is highlighted.
If Barcelona receives the same number of cruise passengers this year as in 2019, a record year – the sector does not dare to guarantee that it will be reached, but the municipal government believes that it will be reached -, the City Council will collect 8 million of euros for the tourist tax paid by these travelers, out of the total of 10.4 million that the activity will generate, including the part that the Generalitat will keep. It is an amount six times greater than that of the pre-pandemic year, when Casa Gran obtained 1.2 million, out of a total of 2.4 million.
The changes approved by the Generalitat in the tax on stays in tourist establishments (IEET) from this April and the increase in the surcharge applied by the City Council from 2021 explain the increase in revenue from cruises and , above all, the one that goes to the municipal coffers. According to these calculations, this year cruise operators will contribute 13% to the local administration of what they will receive for this tax, which also applies to accommodation, when in 2019 it was 8.4%.
This tax share is significantly higher than the weight that this tourist segment has on the total number of visitors to the Catalan capital, which in the last year before covid was 4.1%, according to the same study. The report takes into account the nearly 2.3 million cruise passengers – people – and not the 3.1 million movements that occurred between embarkations and disembarkations, which is the figure usually given in official statistics .
The study, prepared by Jordi Suriñach, professor of Applied Economics, and Esther Vayá, professor of the same specialty, both from the UB and the AQR-Lab laboratory, details that cruises experienced significantly lower growth than the rest of tourist options between 2010 and 2019, with an annual average of 3.1% against 4.5% of overnight stays, 4.3% of the number of visitors and 8% of passengers arriving by road aerial The increase in base port cruise passengers – those who start or end their maritime route in the city, who tend to spend extra nights on land and spend more – was 3.7%, while the of transit, who stay only a few hours and make quick trips to a few points of interest, was 2.8%.
“In Barcelona we are the only means of transport charged with the tourist tax, because you can come by bus without spending the night in the city or paying anything”, criticized Alfredo Serrano, director of CLIA, during the presentation of the study, which , moreover, sees this tax as “quite high”. Unlike accommodations, which charge it directly to customers, on cruises “the shipping companies are mostly absorbing it”, he assured. In any case, it was asked that “if it is collected to alleviate the supposed inconveniences generated by cruise ships or tourism in certain neighborhoods, why is there not more transparency? What is this tax materializing? There is a great lack of knowledge.”
Serrano, who recalled that cruise ships “are at the forefront of the transformation of maritime transport” (in the reduction of polluting emissions or water consumption, for example), questioned whether they are generating congestion of people in Barcelona “When it is said that there are 400,000 cruise passengers in a month – he explained – it is not true; they are movements, not people”. However, the director of the shipping companies’ association assured that the companies are willing to diversify visits and to expand certain areas. The study indicates that in 2019 the daily average was 6,566 cruise passengers in the city, when the total number of visitors in the same period was 158,610. In the last ten years there have only been five days with more than 30,000 cruise passengers in the city. In any case, both the authors of the study and the director of CLIA lamented the lack of data to be able to determine whether cruise passengers saturate certain spaces.
On the same issue, the deputy mayor of Urban Ecology, Janet Sanz, yesterday accused the Generalitat of “throwing balls out” and not taking measures “to limit the disproportionate presence of cruise ships that Barcelona assumes today”. The council regretted that the Councilor for the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà , has given a negative response to his request to urgently convene the institutional table that studies the limitation of cruise ships with the argument that the port is already promoting a council for the sustainability of this activity in which shipping companies will participate. “It doesn’t serve us”, said Sanz, who sees it as “indispensable” to go beyond technical instances and bet on “public leadership” to leave behind a model, that of cruises, which he considers “expired and obsolete”.
