What most people booking a cheap holiday in the sun don’t seem to realise is that their friendly tour operator back in the UK is actually being bribed to attract them to Spain. In essence, Spain’s many regions compete against one another to underwrite the cost of bringing the turistas out hereby paying a proportion of the cost.
So the Junta de Andalucia has just paid Jet2.com €175,000 and BA a further €100,000 to keep flying to Andalucia in 2015.
Peter Kearns from Jet2 Holidays received a large cheque from our local Minister of Tourism, Rafael Rodríguez at the World Travel Market in London this weekend and expects to bring some 220,000 Brits to Andalucia next season, most of them staying in three or four star hotels along the coast. That’s 10% more than this year.
And Lucy Wesley from BA, as she slipped her cheque into her breast pocket, smiled and said how happy BA was to be working with Andalucia. British, as the Junta keeps calling them, operates 33 weekly flights to Andalucia, mainly to Málaga airport, but has promised a new five times a week flight between Seville and Gatwick in 2015.
This is a bit more comforting for us, we have had a house in andalucia for 12 years now and are planning to move out for good in April next year. The referendum result was a huge blow to us, we can only hope that things calm down over the next two years and the medical situation can be solved , otherwise I,m afraid many ex pats will be reluctantly on their way back to Blighty