The Legal Impacts of COVID-19 in the Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Industry

3 Bearing in mind that the tourist sector accounts for 35% of the GDP of the Autonomous Community of the Canaries, this association proposes some measures to rebuild the tourist sector on different bases than those already known, with a more integrated vision, more solidarity and, of course, more collaboration, to let this sector be favoured without leaving anyone in the way 4 . Along these lines, it proposes the creation of “a platform where all the tourist offer has a place”, obviously including the traditional accommodation offer and the tourist housing offer, but also “the leisure, health, beauty, wellbeing, transport, restoration, car rental , creating new segmented and specific products”, to open new ways of marketing of the Canary Islands’ plural offer. In his opinion, there is “no other platform like this one, so it is possible to make it grow worldwide and show that the Canary Islands have the potential, the capacity and the tourist intelligence to create a fairer OTA that enriches both the coffers of the autonomous community and society as a whole”. This also comes at a time when the collapse of airlines and traditional OTAs has left the traditional hotel sector to its own devices. In the full conviction that the complementary activity to the traditional and sectorial one can be a solution to this crisis, in the following pages, we will direct our attention to these activities. In this sense, we will qualify these activities as collaborative economy or not, taking into account the legal nature of the service provider. In the end, this classification is useful to clarify the legal regulation of the transaction that serves as a basis, and if it is possible to count on specific protection measures that the tourist has when he demands the service from the professional of the sector. All of this contributes to providing greater legal security to these transactions, favouring their development, especially in times like these, when their necessity is evident. II. Collaborative Tourism Activities as a Preliminary Issue Undoubtedly, tourism has been one of the economic sectors most affected by the expansion of the so-called collaborative economy 5 , since it has not been foreign to these 4 These measures are available in : http://www.circuloturisticodecanarias.com/propuestas.html. 5 The name of the collaborative economy has been changing as a result of the different works of the European Commission. In 2014, the European Economic and Social Committee, in its opinion Collaborative or participatory consumption: a model of sustainability for the 21st century (2014/C 177/01), identified the