The British press has once again printed false and damaging statements about Lanzarote and its tourist strategy, including claims that Lanzarote prefers German tourists to British ones.
Yesterday, The Times printed a large article on page 3 titled “Brits too grotty for Lanzarote”, while GBNews posted an article titled “Lanzarote plotting crackdown on UK tourists as Canary Islands seek “higher quality” Germans.
The Times article stated “The leader of Lanzarote, a Canary Island wildly popular with British holiday-makers, says her community has had its fill of them and will seek to attract a “higher-quality” class of visitor from Germany instead.”
However, Cabildo president María Dolores Corujo has said no such thing. She, nor any other official on Lanzarote has ever spoken disparagingly about British tourists, or compared them to German, or any other, tourists.
Once again, the source of this damaging misinformation appears to be the Tenerife-based English-language newspaper Canarian Weekly, which on March 8th published a story about a woman who had complained about the behaviour of British tourists in the Canaries on the Mumsnet website.
In this article, the paper claimed that “the president of the Lanzarote Cabildo publicly stated that their aim was to reduce the number of ‘low quality’ British tourists in favour of ‘higher quality’ European visitors”.
What the president, Maria Dolores Corujo, actually said in a press release announcing Lanzarote’s participation at the ITB Berlin Travel Fair, was “It’s vital to work on the diversification of the sector and on the growth of markets such as Germany, which are in line with our intentions to commit to higher quality tourism and greater spending at the destination, at the expense of mass tourism.”
The recent misleading articles in the British press, added to false claims in early February that the island planned to limit British tourists, have prompted thousands of comments from British readers who have criticised Lanzarote and threatened not to holiday on the island.
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