More, No Wait, Less Tourists (but More Money)

Following another successful session at the Fitur Madrid tourist fair this past weekend, Spain is preparing itself for the 2024 season.

The Costa Blanca tourist councillors and mayors at Fitur.

With numbers of visitors beginning to reach uncomfortable highs, there are plans to try and resolve the problems. After all, as we know, it’s not really the crowds of foreigners, so much as the amount they spend. The Express brings us: ‘Spain only wants to attract 'high-class tourists' as the country becomes overwhelmed. Spain is set to focus on 'high value visitors' including those with significant 'spending power' as the country battles high visitor numbers’.

Plans to spread the visitors around won’t work – after a cold and dull winter, the truth is that nobody wants to go and visit Huercal Overa (a market town in Northern Almería present – inexplicably – at Fitur) for their hols. They want Benidorm.

Tourist apartments are a low-hanging target. ‘Town councils may establish limitations regarding the maximum number of homes for tourist purposes, per building or sector’. There are, we read, 80,000 of these just in Andalucía. In Mallorca, ‘Holiday lets are to blame for Mallorca tourist overcrowding’. Controls are evidently overdue.

This is for the comfort and safety of the customer, peace of mind for the neighbours, and a more ready income for the hoteliers.

Even though tourist-rentals work out as being usually more expensive than hotel stays.  

Then we read of the ‘alarm at the boom in the number of tourist homes in Spain’.  Exeltur considers this as the worst problem facing the tourist industry in 2004 ‘ahead even of concerns regarding the Government cutting short-range domestic flights’.

Some hotels are still yet to recover from the Covid crisis, as we see in an article at Infobae: ‘Tourism is still not profitable: half of the hotels in Málaga, Madrid and Barcelona are at high risk of defaulting on the banks’.

The Bank of Spain weighs in, concerned about the ‘increases in the minimum wage, difficulties in finding staff and adapting to new technologies’ (none of which are particularly a problem for tourist lets).

But, while the high numbers of tourists staying in the downtown apartments is certainly a problem (with their little wheelie-suitcases trundling noisily across the cobble-stones) and one should always feel sorry for the grand hotels with their assembly-line business model, the long-term threat comes from elsewhere.

The looming climate-crisis.