SPAIN | F. JAVIER MELGOSA ARCOS 773 his job, offered to guide groups in exchange for a tip, i.e., as a form of pure survival39. In 2004, the company Sandemans New Europe40, one of the platforms operating today, offering guided tours for anyone, regardless of travel budget, was born. The growth of these types of services through platforms is enormous; the examples are the following: Context Travel, Triperone.com, Freetour.com or GuruWalk, which now operates in more than 70 countries as an intermediary for free tours. Currently, the proliferation of the free tour model has come into conflict with official guides and the Confederation of Official Tourist Guides of Spain (Cefapit)41, which encompasses 15,000 professionals in the sector, has been calling on tourism administrations to regulate free tours and unify regional regulations. ACOSTA PENCO addresses several essential issues such as the altruistic nature - tip or donation as a thank you to the guide for the information provided - which can be qualified as an act of liberality and, in principle, would prevent the activity from being classified as a service, since Article 4 of the Services Directive establishes that for the purposes of this Directive, “service” means “cualquier actividad económica por cuenta propia, prestada normalmente a cambio de una remuneración, contemplada en el artículo 50 del Tratado”42. It goes on to note that there are more and more voices in favour of considering the tip or donation as a genuine service received and refers to the opinion of the Economic Administrative Court of the Autonomous Community of Navarre, which ruled on the taxation of the activity of the income derived from free tours for personal income tax purposes. The court considered that the free tours were originally free of charge and were part of youth initiatives and local development projects but have ended up becoming real companies that carry out an economic activity43. In the same line, the Directorate General of Tourism of Castilla-La Mancha has pronounced itself in Instruction 1/2017, of 3 April, in which it concludes that “la actividad de free tour no es en ningún caso una actividad de voluntariado 39 MANIATIS, A. & CORTÉS-RAMÍREZ, E.E., op. cit., p 63. 40 Source: https://www.neweuropetours.eu. 41 Source : https://www.cefapit.com/. 42 ACOSTA PENCO, T. Las competencias de la Unión Europea en materia de Turismo Colaborativo. En especial, la influencia del Derecho de la Unión Europea en la configuración del régimen jurídico aplicable al modelo de Free Tour, in the collective work directed by Humberto GOSÁLBEZ “Tratado jurídico ibérico e iberoamericano del turismo colaborativo”, Ed. Thomson Reuters-Aranzadi, 2021, pp. 64 et seq. Translator’s note: “any economic activity on own account, normally provided for remuneration, as referred to in Article 50 of the Treaty”. 43 Resolution 7013 of the Economic-Administrative Tribunal of the Autonomous Community of Navarre, of 28 November 2018.
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