Spain Tourism Heading To Worst Year Ever

August 3, 2020 Madrid Metropolitan

The Spanish tourist season has collapsed with the lowest levels of incoming travellers registered since records began.

Figures released today by Frontur show that only 204,926 foreigners entered Spain in the month of June representing a 97.7% fall from June 2019.

The state of emergency ended on June 21st.

Due to the closed border in April and May no foreign visitors were registered entering the country.

In the first quarter 2020 10, 785, 196 tourists entered Spain being a fall of 64% from the 38 million visitors in the first quarter of last year. The first quarter included the first stage of the state of emergency from March 16th.

Many hotels remain closed or partially open with an expected restart which had initially been set for the beginning of September. However with the lastest new coronavirus outbreaks and other countries setting quarantine periods of up to 14 days this is looking increasingly unlikely.

The decision of the UK government for quarantining Spain arrivals has hit particulary hard. Last year over 18 million visitors from the UK came to Spain. This year there have been 2 million registered but these were in the first quarter. For the month of June only 8 473 British tourists arrived in Spain – a 99.6% drop on June 2019.

The figures have also plummeted from other principal European markets with French tourists numbers down 93.2% and Germans 97.4%.

Visiting tourists are also spending less when they arrive in Spain with the government agency Egatur reporting a 30% fall in per tourist expenditure and the average holiday time reduced from 5.7 days to 4.7 days.

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