“The extraordinary growth of tourism from USA it implies a revaluation of our destinations and the verification that we are a country with a very attractive high-quality offer”. With these words, the acting Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Hector Gomez, stressed yesterday that the data released by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) reflect a strong rebound in the arrival of American visitors. And that, in his opinion, is good news for the sector because it responds to an improvement in quality that has led to an explosion in demand and spending despite rising prices.
The head of the branch focused on a specific piece of information: American tourists exceeded half a million in June, which represents a 42% year-on-year climband accumulate more than 1.8 million so far this year, almost 55% more than in the first half of 2022. However, he did not refer to the disbursement made by visitors from the United States in our country because, for the moment, the INE does not break down this data in its tourist spending survey.
Country-specific figures are handled by Turespaña, which is the public body dependent on the Secretary of State for Tourism that draws not only from the INE data, but also from the information that comes from the different delegations throughout the world. And according to the balance to which EL MUNDO has had access, American tourists were left in our country €3.6 billion in the first semester of the year. Although it is a relatively small amount of total international tourist spending in this period, which exceeds 46,000 million, it represents a rebound of no less than 34% compared to the same months of 2019year prior to the outbreak of the pandemic.
Between January and June 2023, Spain received 17.4% more visitors from the US than in the first half of 2019 thanks to a key factor, in parallel with the generalized recovery of the sector after the worst years of the pandemic, which is that air connectivity marked a favorable trend for this market. After the opening in 2022 of two new direct connections from New York to Palma de Mallorca and Tenerife, in May 2023 another new route between New York and Malaga and 23 direct connections between US and Spanish destinations were reached.
And the positive trend has multiplied, since, according to the microdata that Turespaña exploits, in the accumulated second quarter of 2023 the US market registered robust growth compared to 2022, both in the flow of tourists, with an increase of 54, 7%, as in the disbursement made, where a rebound of up to 60.8%.