The Official Gazette of Castilla y León published in February 2019 its new Tourist Inspection Plan (Plan de Inspección Turística) for the period 2019-2022 approved by the Town Hall that gives priority to the control of housing for tourist use and the activity of tourist guides to avoid saturating residential neighbourhoods and clamp down on illegal rentals (without holiday rental licence) in the sector.
The new Plan consists of four fundamental objectives: -
- to maintain adequate standards of tourist quality, both in the facilities and in the provision of services;
- eliminate clandestine activity;
- guarantee the rights of tourists and
- achieve a homogenous application of tourism legislation through common guidelines in the exercise of the inspection function.
For the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, this new way of managing accommodation must be linked to new ways to control the legality of tourism so that the "traditional visit" that inspectors made to accommodations must be completed with new ways to detect activities that escape from legality.
For this reason, new control tools are included in the new Inspection Plan, such as web queries, especially in the field of housing for tourist use, where their marketing is done, through digital platforms. In addition, to expedite the work of the inspection will be provided with technological means that facilitate the work of inspectors, such as tablets and specific computer applications.
The Tourism Inspection Plan also contemplates the control of the activity of other sectors where there may be more incidence of intrusiveness, such as tourism guides, rural tourism accommodation, active tourism activities or tourist lodges in the Caminos de Santiago.
In addition to this objective of the Plan, aimed at eliminating clandestine activity for properties that have not registered and obtained the legally required holiday rental licence in Castilla y Leon, other objectives are foreseen, such as the control of the quality of the holiday rental accommodation.
The Plan itself includes follow-up actions coordinated by the General Directorate of Tourism and the preparation of a final report that will include a summary of the actions carried out, specifying the objective that corresponds to each one of them and the type of actions carried out, the quantification and analysis of the results obtained, as well as the proposals and suggestions for the improvement and elaboration of the following Inspection Plan.
Thus, the Tourism Inspection Plan 2019-2022 aims to be a useful instrument to develop its objectives, so that it is possible to easily determine and guarantee the effectiveness of the actions and the achievement of results.
In the elaboration of the new Inspection Plan, the analysis and assessment of the execution of the previous Tourism Inspection Plan for 2016-2017 have been taken into account, whose average degree of compliance has been over 85 per cent.
Original article (in Spanish): Europapress