The tourist associations of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife are demanding solutions to avoid the huge queues of passengers at the health and passport checkpoints at the Gran Canaria and Tenerife South airports this weekend, which is affecting international arrivals (domestic flights are not affected as they don’t go through these control points).
According to images that have emerged on social media, hundreds of people waited last Friday and Saturday squashed close to each other without being able to keep social distanced, after arriving at the terminal to present their proof of vaccination or negative test result, due to a lack of staff and counters provided by the Ministry of Health.
On Saturday more than 52,000 people passed through Gran Canaria’s airport, with only eight counters for passengers from Schengen countries and another eight for the rest, according to Aena, which at certain times caused huge queues in the terminal. There were also bottleneck moments on Sunday, although to a lesser extent as only 39,000 arrivals passed through.
The president of the Federation of Hospitality and Tourism Entrepreneurs (FEHT) of Las Palmas, José María Mañaricua, said yesterday that there have already been two weekends in which there have been problems, and although they tried to reinforce the staffing "it was insufficient", so FEHT demands that the Government intervene to provide more personnel in the area of Health checks at the Gran Canaria airport to put an end to the problem.
“The image of hundreds of passengers waiting with no distancing between them, at the Canaries two main airports, is a very bad representation of the Islands,” Mañaricua said.
Aena, who manages all of Spain’s airports, has made an official request to the Ministry of Health to increase their staff at Tenerife South and Gran Canaria airport, and at the same time has requested to the Taxi Co-operative's, that more cars be available at the airports for arriving passengers also.
An Aena spokesperson said, “The winter season started on November 1st with an increase in the number of people arriving at the islands, so the ancillary services must be staffed so that they can cope quickly and efficiently with the volume of passengers. These are fundamental requirements for the reactivation of tourism to ensure that people’s experience arriving in our destination is a positive one.”
