Article published by Mr. José Carlos Francisco in La Gaveta Económica in the June 2017 issue.
On June 6, a conference sponsored by APD and the company "Bird & Bird" was held in Madrid under the title: "Brexit, Threat or Opportunity? Impact on the Spanish economy and business", in which I participated along with Matías Rodríguez Inciarte, Jaime García-Legaz and Antonio Vázquez. I will now present the synthesis of my intervention, which focused on the cases of the tourism sector.
The first reflection has to do with the calendar, which, as you know, sets the departure of the United Kingdom from the EU for 2019. It seems short to me, since a year has passed since the referendum and little has been done, taking into account that any issue in the EU is always a process, I do not see anything clear that the initially planned dates will be met.
The second reflection is that calculating the impact of Brexit on the tourism sector depends on the model that is negotiated. Hard or soft will not be the same. In any case, the econometric models choose the evolution of the pound-euro exchange rate as the most relevant variable, and this has varied substantially since pre-Brexit (between 10% and 20%). However, an analysis of the first five months of 2016, in relation to the same months of 2017, shows that in all of them, the influx of English tourists to Spain continued to increase, contradicting the logic of economic theory.
Consequently, reality contradicts theory, to the extent that the first is very complex, volatile and involves many more things than the exchange rate, and the second (the theory) presupposes ceteris paribus (if everything remains the same), which is exactly what does not occur in our world, where if anything is permanent, it is change.
The third reflection, a consequence of the previous ones, is what tourism companies can do in the face of this very uncertain panorama. Taking into account the aforementioned uncertainty and, as Nicholas Taleb says, the occurrence of highly improbable events, I recommend: developing innovative products, investing in renovation and maintenance, controlling costs, serving markets of origin other than the big three (England, Germany and Spain), introducing more technology into the value chain, geographically diversifying the offer (if possible) and smiling, smiling a lot...especially at British customers.
