The debate opened by the mayor Ada Colau almost a year ago on the limitation of the cruise ships that Barcelona receives to reduce the excessive negative impacts that, in her opinion, they generate – pollution and crowds – is still alive and will surely be a prominent issue in the campaign of 28-M. In this context, the shipping companies association (CLIA) has presented this Thursday a study commissioned to professors from the University of Barcelona (UB) in which a large part of these pernicious effects are questioned and the contribution of this segment of activity to the municipal coffers.
If Barcelona receives the same number of cruise passengers this year as in 2019, a record year -the sector does not dare to ensure that it will be reached, but the municipal government believes that it will be reached-, the City Council will collect 8 million euros for the tourist tax that these travelers pay out of a 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 the Great House obtained 1.2 million, out of a global of 2.4 million.
The changes approved by the Generalitat in the Tax on Stays in Tourist Establishments (IEET) since this April and the increase in the surcharge applied by the City Council since 2021 explain the increase in collection from cruise ships and, above all, that which It goes to the municipal coffers. According to these calculations, cruise passengers will contribute 13% to the local Administration this year of what they will enter for this rate, which is also applied to accommodation, when in 2019 it was 8.4%.
This tax participation 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 the covid was 4.1%, according to the same study. The report takes into account about 2.3 million cruise passengers –people– and not the 3.1 million movements that were generated between embarkations and disembarkations, which is the figure that is 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 from the AQR-Lab laboratory, details that cruises experienced significantly lower growth than other tourist options between 2010 and 2019, with an annual average of 3.1% compared to 4.5% of overnight stays, 4.3% of the number of visitors and 8% of passengers arriving by air. The increase in base port cruise passengers –those who begin or end their sea route in the city, who are the ones who usually spend additional nights on land and spend more– was 3.7%, while transit passengers, who only They spend a few hours and make quick excursions to a few points of interest, it was 2.8%.
"In Barcelona we are the only means of transport taxed with the tourist tax, because you can come by bus without spending the night in the city and not pay anything," Alfredo Serrano, director of CLIA, criticized during the presentation of the study, which, in addition , sees this tax “quite high”. Unlike accommodations, which charge their customers directly, on cruises "the shipping companies are mostly absorbing it," he assured. In any case, he has asked himself that “if it is collected to alleviate the supposed inconveniences that cruise ships or tourism generate in certain neighborhoods, why isn't there more transparency? What is this tax materializing in? There is great ignorance."
Serrano, who has 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), has 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 has stated – it is not true, they are movements, not people”. However, the director of the shipping association has ensured that they are willing to diversify visits and sponge certain areas. The study indicates that in 2019 the daily average was 6,566 in the city, when the number of visitors in this same period was 158,610. In those ten years there were only 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 have lamented the lack of data to be able to determine if cruise passengers saturate certain spaces.
