Tourism in Spain can now definitively shelve the pandemic. With some exceptions, the tourist figures for this August will reach those of 2019 and will even be slightly exceeded, after closing a July with occupancy rates of more than 80% on the entire Spanish coast, and 85% and up to 90%. in the Balearic and Canary Islands. Room prices have also recovered and will continue to rise this August. These are the forecasts launched by the hotel employer Cehat, which until now had expressed itself with some restraint in terms of growth expectations for 2023, due to inflation, the reduction in savings and the increase in operating and financial costs. In the words of its president, Jorge Marichal, the profitability of the hotels “this August will be well above that of 2019”, 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 assumes that the number of visitors this August will be higher than that of 2022 and also that of 2019, a pre-pandemic year with record numbers that closed with more than 10 million foreign tourists. It is the final push they are waiting for to definitively overcome the consequences of the pandemic, a barrier with which all indicators have been measured since the outbreak of the coronavirus. In Andalusia, for example, hoteliers calculate 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 dominating, they have closed a July with 75% occupancy and this August they expect to approach 82%.
Barcelona, ??according to estimates by the city’s Hotelers’ Guild and in the words of its president, Manel Casals, will close August with an occupancy of 87%, which, although it is one point lower than what was registered in the summer of 2019 (88%), It is more than offset by the increase in room prices, which compared only to last year, are 18 euros above average. “That point may be circumstantial, but it is true that profitability is well above that registered in 2019,” says Casals.
And it is that in this context of tourist normalization, prices are playing a key role, despite inflation. The average prices of Spanish hotels have been 135 euros per night during the first half of this year, compared to 112.8 euros in 2019. The profitability is also notorious: 81.7 euros in the country as a whole in 2019 compared to the 95.4 euros reached so far this year (16% more).
Barcelona is the city in the entire ranking that is registering the best results, according to the barometer of the aforementioned tourist consultancies. Its average price this summer is being 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 exceed the figures for the first half of 2022, when their prices shot up to 247.5 euros on average compared to 169.3 euros in the historic 2019 “The hotel industry managed to contain the effects of the pandemic at the price level, which has made it possible to apply upward corrections once occupancy levels have recovered, responding to inflation that also affects the operating margin of businesses,” Bruno analyzes. Hallé, partner and co-director of Cushman
Another noteworthy figure for this summer is the recovery of long-haul tourism, mainly from the United States and also eastern tourism, mainly from China, which increased by 420% in these first six months of the year, close to 136,000 and with a average cost of 3,100 euros per person and trip. Although the Chinese and in general the Asian is the one that registers the highest percentages of growth compared to the first half of 2022, according to Frontur data, it is the North American that is closest to reaching the pre-pandemic rates. 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 whom it disputes third place in terms of issuing country.
