The tourism sector in the Canary Islands currently employs 35% of the Canarian population and accounts for up to a third of the community’s GDP.
The Canarian Community is the second region of Spain that receives the highest number of foreign tourists after Catalonia.
According to data from AENA, the most visited island would be Tenerife with 37% of the cake, followed by the island of Gran Canaria with 31% and Lanzarote and Fuerteventura with 17% and 14% respectively. The rest of the islands, such as La Palma, are around 1% of foreign visitors.
Holiday Rentals in Canary Islands
If we focus on car rental prices in the Canaries, the cheapest car rental destinations in 2017 were Lanzarote (€ 11.08 on average per day) and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (€ 12.83). It should be noted that one of the most competitive car rental companies in the Canary Islands is TopCar and has been operating in the Canary Islands within the sector of car rental for quite some time.
On the other hand, the Canarian market has been traditionally counting on large direct investments of national and foreign capital, mainly of large hotel chains, which has led to great competition for foreign tourists. In addition, thanks to the European market and the outermost situation of the Canarian archipelago, community investments in the islands have received certain tax advantages that have pushed the Canarian economy.
The high competition has forced many Canarian companies to modernize and make the leap to the digital world by pure necessity of survival.
One case of success in this digital transformation in the tourism sector is Las Casas Canarias, a website to find holiday rentals in Gran Canaria that offers holiday homes and villas in the seven islands of the archipelago.
Las Casas Canarias was one of the first Canarian companies to bet on the digital strategy back in 2002 and has positioned itself as one of the leading holiday rental companies locally.
The portal has also served as a springboard for small tourist owners. Thanks to Las Casas Canarias anyone who owns a villa or apartment that meets quality standards can take advantage of the vacation rental boom in Gran Canaria, one of the fastest growing islands, and publish their property in the directory and let the Canary company take care of the rest.
In this way the small owners can compete very worthily against the large tourist agglomerates that operate on the islands. This is thanks to the fact that the Canarian company offers the owner a team of specialists in the local tourism sector and with great experience in receiving foreign tourists.
This is just one of the success stories of many companies that have managed to rise to the wave of the omnipresent digital transformation and have managed to implement a digital strategy that is both profitable and environmentally sustainable.