​Vice-President of the Government inaugurates first world summit on shopping tourism

During her speech, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría advocated boosting shopping tourism in Spain as a way to do away with the "bipolarity and seasonality" that affects "such an important sector for job creation". In this regard, she underlined the importance of this type of initiative to help contribute to a cutting-edge sector such as tourism with the renewed vision of commercial activity as a differentiating factor.

In her opinion, shopping tourism allows "the returns from such an important activity in Spain to be increased, as well as to extend it to other sectors of the economy".

The Vice-President of the Government recalled the measures adopted by the government to recover investor confidence and to increase the attraction of the country as a destination for their investments, and highlighted that tourism is the leading Spanish export sector, with a surplus in its trade balance to July of 20 billion euros.

In order to boost shopping tourism, the government is working to speed up processes to return VAT to tourists from outside the EU, as well as to implement an electronic system to validate purchases, underlined Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.

The inaugural event was also attended by the President of the Regional Government of Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes; the Secretary-General of the World Tourism Organization (WTO), Taleb Rifai; the President and CEO of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), David Scowsill; and the President of the Organising Committee of 'Summit Shopping, Tourism & Economy', Aldo Olcese.