Although sometimes the heat can be stifling, each year more tourists choose spain to spend your vacation. United Kingdom, France y Germany They continue to be the main tourist-sending countries, in a flow that quickly recovered after the stoppage caused by the pandemic.
Now, in a second phase of recovery poscovid, it is the Asian tourists who are returning and they are doing so, moreover, with a significant increase in spending. Chinese tourists, for example, have spent in the first half of the year a 29% more on average than they did in 2019, before the outbreak of Covid.
The total number of Chinese travelers, yes, still does not come close to pre-pandemic levels and is 80.6% below the figures for 2019. But the recovery is gaining strength. Asian tourists as a whole have increased their presence in Spain, according to data published by the Spanish Tourism Institute (Turespaña) for the second quarter of 2023, which includes accumulated data for the first half of the year and compares the same period of time 2022,
In particular, China presents an increase of 420% in the absolute number of tourists in the first half of 2023 and its total spending has grown by 592%, compared to the same period of the previous year, a year with practically no activity due to the strong sanitary restrictions in the country of origin. Specifically, the number of Chinese tourists who registered in the first half of 2022 was 26,085; in the same period of time in 2023 that number increased to 135,715 people.
“The recovery of the Asian market, mainly of tourists from China, is excellent news for our tourism. In 2023, with the arrivals this summer, we will recover 80% of pre-pandemic connections, and 2024 will surely be the year of the full consolidation of this market, which is so important for our country”, comments the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Héctor Gómez.