The data from last August, the tourist month par excellence, leaves no room for doubt: the fever for tourist apartments has skyrocketed on the Costa Blanca far above the rest of the country. It surpasses all of them in number of overnight stays, and the opposite would be strange because the offer is extraordinary: 107,560 estimated beds in a total of 22,486 apartments.
To gauge the dimension of this phenomenon, it is enough to compare the data with that recorded in the rest of Spanish tourist areas. The second and third in the ranking, Tenerife and the Costa del Sol in Malaga, barely exceed 45,000 beds in 12,800 and 11,424 apartments respectively, that is, well less than half as many beds as the Alicante coast and around half as many apartments, according to data corresponding to last August released yesterday by the National Institute of Statistics.
Gran Canaria, Mallorca and Lanzarote are the next destinations in this classification, with a capacity for around 41,000 travelers in the first case and 30,000 in the other two, distributed in less than 10,000 tourist apartments. A destination as significant as the Costa Brava has a third of the offer that exists on the Costa Blanca in this tourism subsector.
However, this enormous offer does not translate into a similar difference in favor of the Costa Blanca in terms of job creation. According to statistics provided by the INE, doubling the existing supply of apartments in Tenerife, this subsector creates less employment in Alicante, since 3,004 people were hired, compared to the 3,686 employed on the Canary Island.
And the difference with the rest is small, since the apartments in Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Mallorca and the Costa del Sol employed between 2,700 and 3,000 people, a minimal proportion if we compare it with the existing imbalance in the supply.
Another of the unique characteristics of the Costa Blanca as a destination for apartment users is how balanced its demand is between international and Spanish travelers. Meanwhile, in island destinations such as the Costa del Sol and the Costa Brava the proportion of foreign tourists is much higher, three to one in most cases, almost double in Malaga, in Alicante they stayed in apartments for In the month of August 885,000 foreigners and 797,000 nationals.
A high average stay is another of the characteristics not only of Alicante, but of the Valencian Community as a whole, which received a smaller number of travelers in August than Andalusia in its apartments during the month of August, however, it was the autonomy that most overnight stays recorded -2,530,000; by 1,612,000 from Andalusia – because the average stay was 7.2 days. In the country as a whole, the average stay in tourist apartments was 5.85 days; Only in the Canary Islands the average also exceeded the week.
The exaggerated existing supply naturally results in lower occupancy levels than in other territories, which must undoubtedly have a negative effect on profitability per place, although to confirm this it would be necessary to have the price factor, the that the report does not offer data. But if we look at the 12 Spanish provinces that host the most travelers in apartments, we see that Alicante and Valencia are the only two whose occupancy rate, by available places, was below 50% in August, and below 70% if we consider apartment occupancy.
