The Diplomat
The Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, yesterday expressed her confidence that Spain will receive around 40 million international tourists in 2021, almost half of those registered in the last year before the pandemic.
“This year is going to be a year of transition”, the minister declared during the inauguration in Madrid of the Europa Press Tourism Forum, sponsored by Grupo Hotusa, Renfe and PortAventura. “Clearly, we are going to start to reactivate tourism in summer”, which will allow us to pick up a “cruising speed” that could help turn 2021 into “the year of a recovery as we would like for the tourism sector”. In these circumstances, the “ideal” would be to recover half of the tourists who came to Spain in 2019 because “for the sector it would already be an achievement”, she added.
“I think there are better conditions this summer”, she stated. “We have security elements such as the digital certificate, vaccination will advance and therefore we will have more security to move without this being an element that goes against the priority, which is to combat the pandemic”, she added. Therefore, the digital certificate initiative proposed by the European Commission “allows us to have hope and be more optimistic about the resumption of safe national and international travel in the coming months”, said the minister, who announced that Spain wants to “be a pioneer” in the use of the health passport and is working so that it can be used in the summer.
In any case, she warned, “the pandemic should not be an excuse to return to a tourist model of the past where the important thing was quantity and not quality”. “The sector is also going to benefit from many other investments included in the Recovery Plan”, she continued. “Helping the recovery and transformation of the tourism sector is helping the recovery and transformation of the Spanish economy, because Spain is tourism and the best tourist destination is Spain”, added Maroto. The image of Spain “has not been damaged by the pandemic” and that when some normality is recovered, tourists will return, she said.
On the other hand, the Minister of Tourism affirmed that the closure of the autonomous communities at Easter was a “prudent” measure to “face the summer with more certainty” and defended that it is not possible to travel within Spain but that foreign tourists can come to our country because “they all come with PCR and that cannot be guaranteed in trips in the Peninsula”.
As collected by Europa Press, Spain was in 2019, only behind France, the second country in the world that received the most tourists, with 83.7 million visitors and an expenditure of 92,337 million euros, which was a new record high. In 2020, the number of visitors plunged by almost 80%, to 19 million, due to travel restrictions imposed worldwide to contain COVID-19.
