Iberia joins El Corte Ingles team promote British tax free among travelers and increase their spending in Spain - El Corte Inglés partners with Iberia and British Airways to encourage shopping tourism in Spain for British travelers thanks to tax free.

Since the beginning of 2021, UK residents can get tax refunds on their purchases in the European Union, although restrictions on mobility have diminished the impact of this measure. Now that little by little they can return to our country, Spain can benefit from it and boost spending per tourist.

Spain is the top destination for Britons, with 18.1 million travelers in 2019, ahead of France (10.3 million) and Italy (5.1 million), according to data from the United Kingdom's National Statistics Office (ONS).

Iberia joins El Corte Ingles team promote British tax free

To encourage the spending of British tourists, El Corte Inglés will offer those tourists who take advantage of the tax free a gift card with 10% of the amount spent, according to El País. For their part, Iberia and British Airways will promote the tickets with another 10%.

” The first thing will be to carry out a powerful communication and promotion program in the United Kingdom to explain the benefits of tax free", sources from both companies assure said medium.

Iberia joins El Corte Ingles team promote British tax free

This campaign is important, since most tourists and most of the shops are unaware of this advantage and are not prepared to take advantage of it. Moreover, it is expected to be known in depth by 2023 and it is believed that it will be a balloon of oxygen for a sector that is very affected at the moment.

The refund of the tax paid will not be applied to all types of expenditure, so that food, restaurants, hotels or other non-exportable products are excluded, since the tax discount is only valid for "objects purchased occasionally for personal use or gift".

Iberia joins El Corte Ingles team promote British tax free

The refund of 21% VAT is not automatic at the time of payment, but the customer has to claim it later. To request it, the customer has to request the DIVA tax free form in the store or have the complete invoice that must be stamped at the airport customs.

Experts expect spending to increase, though they don't know how much. To achieve this, they see it necessary to focus on the promotion and information of this possibility both at origin and destination.

As El País points out, one of the great pending tasks in Spain on tax free is to enable the option in the Canary Islands, where due to its special tax regime tourists cannot be welcomed to the refund of the consumption tax.

Iberia joins El Corte Ingles team promote British tax free

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The coronavirus triggers poverty in Spain: 1 in 10 have many difficulties to make ends meet and there are already 3.3 million people with severe shortages

In the first months of the pandemic, the World Bank predicted that some 60 million people worldwide would be pushed into extreme poverty by the coronavirus. A year later, the first official figures for 2020 allow us to see to what extent these forecasts have been met, as in the US, where a study by the universities of Notre Dame, Chicago and Zheijang (China), shows that 8 million Americans fell into poverty last year.

Meanwhile, in Spain, the impact of the coronavirus has led to the increase of population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, known as the rate AROPE, which has gone up from 25.3% in 2019 to 26.4% in 2020, which means that 12.4 million spaniards are at risk of poverty, of suffering shortages of material or low intensity in the job, according to the Survey of Conditions of Life corresponding to the last year, which was just released by the National Institute of Statistics.

The INE attributes this increase in the AROPE rate to the worsening of 2 of its 3 components, given that the percentage of the population suffering from severe material shortages has grown 2.3 percentage points last year to reach 7% of the resident population and the general risk of poverty has increased 3 tenths, to 21%, while the low labor intensity fell 9 tenths to 9.9%.

These figures imply that the population that subsists with severe material shortages has gone from 2.2 million people in 2019 to 3.3 million in 2020, while the general risk of poverty affects 9.9 million residents in Spain, about 150,000 more than the previous year. However, both indicators are still below those achieved during the past crisis.

Thus, the rate AROPE peaked in 2014, and stood at 29.2%, 2.8 percentage points more than in 2020, as the risk of poverty, which climaxed also in 2014, 22.2%, 1.2 points more than last year, while the rate of material deprivation severe is only a tenth below the maximum in that was 7 years ago.

The analysis of the components of the lack of material severe, at least 2 of them have reached historic highs due to the coronavirus, as shown in the graph above, which reveals that the population is falling behind on payments of their home or shopping is 1 percentage point above the previous record of 2014, while the percentage that you can not afford to eat meat or fish at least once every 2 days exceeds 1.6 points the peak reached in 2019.

As for the economic difficulties, despite their increase during the pandemic, their levels are far behind those they held between 2011 and 2016, although the percentage of population that has many difficulties to make ends meet has increased 2.2 points to 10%, while 35.4% can not face unforeseen expenses, 1.5 points more than in 2019, and 34.4% can not allow holidays away from home at least one week a year, one point more.