The Diplomat
The number of tourists that Spain received in 2023 exceeded 84 million, above the record figures of 2019, according to forecasts by the Ministry of Industry and Tourism, with spending of more than 108,000 million euros.
This was announced yesterday by the Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, at a press conference where he took stock of the performance of the Spanish tourism industry throughout 2023, reports Europa Press.
Thus, he detailed that the arrival of international tourists would have managed to surpass the record figure of 2019, a year before the pandemic, by 1%, as well as being 19% higher than 2022, figures that will be confirmed and expanded in early February with data from the National Statistics Institute (INE).
As for spending, Hereu stressed that this has grown at a faster rate than tourist arrivals. Thus, these 108,000 million euros forecast represent an increase of 17.4% over the figures for 2019 and 23.8% more than the previous year.
According to Hereu, this is “a magnificent injection of prosperity” for the Spanish economy, over and above the figure – the number of tourists – which “historically has been the most relevant”, due to the fact that the industry’s ambition now is to make qualitative progress and not so much quantitative progress.
With this data, the minister stressed that the government will stop taking the 2019 data as a reference measure, emphasising that the pandemic is “a cycle that has already been overcome” and that “happily” it has been left behind.
The head of Tourism expressed that 2023 “means a record year in the development of tourism in Spain”, highlighting the “variables that are of most interest”, such as “prosperity, tourist income in Spain and the generation of employment”.
Hereu also predicted that in 2024 the “path of prosperity through tourism” will continue. For the first four months of the year, which includes Easter, 23.2 million international tourists are expected (+10.8%) and more than 30,432 million euros in spending (+18.5%).
He also highlighted the good figures for tourism employment at the end of the year, which ended with the highest number of workers in the historical series, according to data from Turespaña, and which accounted for 12.5% of the total number of workers in the country’s economy at the end of December.
Regarding the future of Spain’s tourism industry, the minister pointed out that this involves attracting tourists from other continents. “Europe has always been a fundamental bank, which we will continue to maintain”, but he will focus on attracting tourists from further afield as part of the “battle for added value”.
Along these lines, he stressed that tourists coming from another continent, “because of the effort they make”, value “gastronomy, culture and the quality of accommodation” very positively. However, he pointed out that it is not a question of forgetting everything else, but of segmenting “well” and adding this element.
