The Coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc on Europe’s tourism sector. In six months’ time half of the businesses may be gone unless the EU steps in quickly, says the European Economic and Social Committee in a new opinion.
In a report by Panagiotis Gkofas it adopted in September, the EESC says EU action is needed to keep tourism businesses afloat and their workers employed in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. And there is no time to lose: wait another six months and half of these businesses may have shut up shop.
To back up its claims, the EESC ran an online survey over the summer that involved 175 organisations representing thousands of tourism businesses, which employ hundreds of thousands of workers across the EU.
Their replies to the EESC’s questionnaire painted a picture of impending disaster.
88.2% of respondents said the COVID-19 crisis had impacted them “very negatively”, 80.6% predicted its effects would hit them even harder in the long term and 45% said they did not expect to survive in 2021.
The report was drawn up in response to the European Commission’s Communication Tourism and transport in 2020 and beyond.
The tourism sector in the EU is estimated to be losing around EUR 1 billion in revenue per month and could slough off 6.4 million jobs in 2020 as a result of COVID-19.
To kickstart the industry, the EU must first and foremost act to restore people’s confidence in the safety of travel, says the EESC.
Pending a vaccine, the EESC supports the idea of an EU health passport with a harmonised Passenger Locator Form (PLF) and QR codes combined with a multilingual Health Assistance Platform.
People could use the QR code to access information and health services in the country they are visiting and have emergency access to health and social security systems.
Another top priority is to make liquidity available to tourism businesses and their employees as soon as possible, as the lack of cashflow is threatening their very survival.
In the EESC’s view, the SURE programme to mitigate unemployment should provide relief for unemployed tourism sector workers and wage compensation for SMEs until at least 30 June 2021.
The Committee also believes the EU should set up a mechanism to monitor the implementation of support measures, since many of the participants in the survey complained that no financial help had been forthcoming after the EU announced it was making funds available. (dm)
