Tourism in Spain can now consider the end of the pandemic. Apart from specific exceptions, the tourist figures this August will reach those of 2019 and even exceed them slightly, after closing a July with occupancy rates of more than 80% throughout the Spanish coast, and 85% and even 90% in the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands. Room prices have also recovered and will continue to rise this August. These are the forecasts made by the hotel employer Cehat, which until now had expressed itself with some moderation in terms of growth expectations for 2023, due to inflation, the reduction of savings and the increase in costs operational and financial. In the words of its president, Jorge Marichal, hotel profitability “will be well above 2019 this August”, specifically 16% more in the country as a whole, according to the barometer of the hotel sector presented yesterday jointly by the firms STR and Cushman
The hotel management takes for granted that the number of visitors this August will be higher than in 2022 and also in 2019, a pre-pandemic year with record numbers that closed with more than ten million foreign tourists. It is the definitive push they are waiting for to definitively overcome the consequences of the pandemic, a barrier against which all the indicators have been measured since the outbreak of covid. In Andalusia, for example, hoteliers estimate that they will close with 7,645,000 overnight stays, 5% more than in August 2022, and barely 0.4% compared to 2019, but already with positive figures. In Galicia, where national tourism is dominant, they closed July with 75% occupancy and this August they expect to approach 82%.
Barcelona, ??according to estimates from the city’s Hoteliers Guild and in the words of its president, Manel Casals, will close August with an occupancy rate of 87%, which although is a point lower than the one recorded in the summer of 2019 ( 88%), is more than compensated by the increase in room prices, which compared to last year alone, are 18 euros above the average. “This point may be circumstantial, but it is true that profitability is much higher than that recorded in 2019”, affirms Casals.
And in this context of tourism normalization, prices play a primary role, despite inflation. The average price of Spanish hotels was 135 euros a night during the first half of this year, compared to 112.8 euros in 2019. Profitability is also notable: 81.7 euros in the country as a whole in 2019, compared to 95.4 euros reached since the beginning of the year (16% more).
Barcelona is the city in the entire ranking that is recording better results, according to the barometer of the mentioned tourist consultants. The average price this summer is 172.6 euros, which represents an increase of 18.4% compared to 2022, the highest in all of Spain, and 14.2% compared to 2019. However , Marbella, which leads the list of prices per night with hotels at 240.8 euros on average, fails to beat the figures of the first half of 2022, when its prices soared to 247.5 euros on average, against the 169.3 euros from the historic 2019. “The hotel industry managed to contain the effects of the pandemic in terms of prices, which has allowed upward corrections to be applied once employment levels have recovered, which have responded to inflation that also affects the operating margin of businesses”, analyzes Bruno Hallé, partner and co-director of Cushman
Another noteworthy fact this summer is the recovery of long-haul tourism, mainly from the United States, and also of eastern tourism, mainly from China, which increases by 420% in the first six months of the year and borders 136,000, with an average of 3,100 euros spent per person per trip. Although Chinese and, in general, Asian are the ones that register the highest growth percentages from the first half of 2022, according to data from Frontur, it is the North American that is closest to achieving the indices prepandemic With a growth of 54.7% compared to the same period last year, it already exceeds 3.6 million tourists, just a few thousand behind France, with which it is competing for third place in terms of issuing country
