Amid peak summer travel and a simmering anti-tourism mood in the country, Spain’s Tourism Ministry will work with British travel agents to better monitor tourism flows from the country.
Spain’s Ministry of Industry and Tourism has partnered with the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) to accelerate the digitalisation and sustainability of high-volume tourist destinations in the country.
The agreement, formalised through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, begins a two-year pilot scheme in four of Spain’s most visited tourist destinations where British holidaymakers make up a large proportion of the clientele: Benidorm, Calvià (Mallorca), Lloret de Mar (Girona) and Seville, although the scheme remains open to new destinations in the future.
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The initiative aims to tackle the challenges of overcrowding and seasonality in Spain’s main source market, the UK, which accounted for 18.2 per cent of arrivals and 14.7 per cent of spending in the first few months of the year.
This comes as mass tourism has become a big issue in Spain, with a series of anti-tourist protests in various Spanish cities and islands in recent years.
According to a Ministry press release: “Through this framework for collaboration, public authorities and the tourism sector will work together to identify innovative solutions to the challenges posed by the management of pilot destinations with high tourist numbers.”
The signing ceremony was presided over by Spain’s Minister for Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, and various regional and local tourism bosses from around the country.
In monitoring tourist flows, the Ministry states, “the aim is to encourage the exchange of data, recommendations, experiences, information and best practice that will help move towards a more balanced, resilient and sustainable model of tourism, whilst strengthening the sector’s competitiveness and the well-being of the public.
“Key areas of work include monitoring tourist flows from the United Kingdom, analysing visitor satisfaction and residents’ perceptions, identifying opportunities to reduce seasonality in demand, and ensuring a more even regional distribution of the benefits of tourism,” it adds.
The memorandum will have an initial term of two years, extendable for a further two years subject to agreement between the parties.
The partnership also forms part of the ‘Spain Tourism 2030’ Strategy, approved by the Spanish Government to drive the transformation of the tourism sector towards a model that is more sustainable from an economic, social and environmental perspective.
Monitoring tourist arrivals, especially British nationals, is especially important this summer as Spanish airports will be welcoming large numbers via the new EES border system, something that has caused delays and confusion in airports across Europe.
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In airports home to mass tourism destinations such as Alicante or Mallorca, UK nationals make up a very large proportion of non-EU arrivals going through the new biometric border scans.
But the summer season is around the corner and it’s at times of high volumes of air traffic when flights land one after another and the EES system is truly put to the test.
The Canary government has called for an urgent solution from Pedro Sánchez’s government to the “unsustainable” situation for British passengers at Tenerife South Airport in particular.
Spanish hoteliers and tourism bosses have also called for more police and fully functioning passport control machines at Spanish airports to fix the problem of long waits for Brits and other non-EU tourists since the rollout of the EU’s new Entry Exit System.
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