Italy: Beach club owners threaten August strikes as EU rules threaten their livelihoods

Rome: Beach club operators in Italy have threatened to go on strike over EU plans for their businesses.

Known as lidos in Italian these businesses rent out sunbeds and umbrellas, some are nothing more whereas others are lavish beach clubs with restaurants and bars spanning large swathes of beach. They can cost anywhere upwards of €25 to hire two loungers and a parasol for the day, with some as expensive as €200 in upmarket resorts such as Capri.

Under the new rules, licences for the beach clubs will be up for tender from early next year. Until now, lidos have been passed down through families, creating what many see as a monopoly.

Many beaches have been taken over by these operators with just a small area of sand left as a “free beach” that you don’t have to pay to use.

Approximately 50 per cent of Italy’s sandy coastline is entrusted to beach clubs, campsites or similar businesses, according to the Italian environmental association Legambiente. Bathing isn’t permitted in some areas of the remaining half.

Beach club operators argue they have invested in their businesses, building them up over the years.

They say that if the Italian government doesn’t listen to their pleas for compensation and to protect their businesses, they will continue to strike throughout August with each protest getting gradually longer. It is the busiest month for tourism in Italy, with many Italians taking the whole month off work along with millions of international visitors.

In 2006, new EU competition rules known as the Bolkestein Directive were approved which meant Italy’s private beach club concessions would have to be put up for public tender from January 2025. This would see them reallocated through a fair bidding process in an attempt to protect consumers.

Historically, they have been automatically renewed and passed down from one generation of a family to the next for decades. Some families have become rich off their businesses, earning millions of euros.

These rules have been postponed multiple times by several different Italian governments. When elected in 2022, Giorgia Meloni extended the concessions until the end of this year. The government attempted to extend it again after this but the Council of State and the European Union rejected their proposal.

Italy’s roughly 30,000 concession holders have been fighting this EU directive in recent months. They say that the plan threatens the survival of their businesses and the livelihood of their 300,000 employees. Now two of the sector’s business associations are threatening to close their umbrellas symbolically and go on strike this August to protest the directive.

Operators are also asking the government to provide compensation for those who lose their concession. Municipalities which historically issue them have been putting policies in place for business owners set to lose their long-term concessions. Beach club owners, however, want Meloni to adopt a national policy that would guarantee them at least two years of their annual turnover as compensation.

Rents for these beach spaces are low meaning the State collects around €100 million a year from five million square metres of concessions that rake in an estimated revenue of €32 billion. It makes any kind of compensation hard for the government to justify.