On Monday 31st of March, the sectorial board of Aehcos, the Costa del Sol Hotel Entrepreneurs Association held a meeting to discuss the needs and strengths of the sector in the short and medium term, already thinking about the start of the high season.  

The hoteliers expressed their concern about the large number of holiday homes and the lack of regulation in the sector. According to Javier Hernández, executive vice-president of Aehcos, "we are grateful to the Town Hall for coming to this meeting called by the tourist accommodation establishments of Mijas. The truth is that we consider this type of meeting to be very necessary, taking into account the importance of public-private collaboration. Here we have discussed fundamental issues such as the promotion of Mijas as a destination, strengths and types of tourists who come. All this in order to revitalise Mijas as a tourist municipality.

 

Town Hall support

The meeting was attended by the mayoress of Mijas, Ana Mata (PP), and the councillor for Tourism, Francisco Jeréz (Vox), who have opened channels of permanent dialogue with the group. They have also taken up the hoteliers' proposal to create a regular tourism board to discuss and learn first-hand about the needs of the sector and jointly promote the Mijas tourism brand. 

According to the mayoress, "from now on, we are going to develop a technical board for the tourism sector, which together with the Town Hall, will join forces with the whole sector. With all the sectors involved we are going to tackle different problems and needs in order to achieve our aim, that Mijas becomes an international benchmark". Jerez also stressed that "the Town Hall is committed to supporting the sector, and viceversa, to strengthen the Mijas tourism brand, to make it an international benchmark, and to open it up to new sectors".

For his part, the general manager of the hotel La Zambra, which hosted the meeting, Joost Kruissen, said that "we talked about the importance of this joint work between the private sector and the Town Hall to communicate their needs and requests. Communication is key to move forward, to promote Mijas as a destination and to fight against the other municipalities around us and above all to position it as a quality tourism".

Concerns of the sector

The concerns of the sector were also raised at the table. The vice-president of Aehcos in Mijas, Juan Miguel Marcos, assured that "we are concerned about the other models, above all, the dwellings for tourist use. Not because of their existence as such. We are open to other tour operators coming to the area. What worries us on the one hand, is the saturation that Mijas has, where the percentage of tourist housing is almost 55% of the current population. Tourist housing is welcome as long as it complies with the regulations and does not represent unfair competition and does not harm the hotels nor the citizens". In this sense, the mayoress said that "there is a problem of tourist housing. In our municipality there is a large number that needs to be regulated". 

Aehcos speaks of 52,000 tourist accommodation places compared to 2,500 hotel places, which is why they are calling for real regulation, control and to avoid saturation and the lack of quality services. 

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