ARCHIVED - Visitors from the UK to Spain spent almost 1 million euros per hour in January

Fewer visitors from the UK and Germany led to slightly fewer coming from abroad during the month

Data related to the last few months have provided indications that the level of international tourism in Spain may have reached a peak for the time being, and the latest figures released on Monday in relation to January 2020 show that the number of visitors arriving from abroad could fall this year for the first time in years.

During January Spain welcomed 4.14 million foreign visitors, 1.4 per cent fewer than in the first month of 2019 and the seventh year-on-year decrease in the last nine months. In the month leading up to the official departure of the UK from the European Union it would be easy to attribute the drop entirely to Brexit, and indeed there was a sharp decrease of 11 per cent in the number of British visitors, to 718,248.

But the UK still accounted for 17.4 per cent of the total as the figures also fell for most of the other major markets, including Germany (down by 4.6 per cent to 494,000) and Scandinavia (9.6 per cent lower at 342,000). The most significant increases, on the other hand, were seen in the figures for the Americas excluding the USA (+20 per cent) and France (up by 7.7 per cent to 480,000).

The most eye-catching feature of the breakdown by the six main tourist regions was a fall of 26.8 per cent in the Balearics, doubtless influenced to a large degree by the trend in the German and British markets, while there were rises of between 4 and 6 per cent in Andalucía, the Comunidad Valenciana and Madrid: the Costa Cálida falls into the catch-all category of “other regions”, in which there was a rise of just 0.1 per cent.

The number of British visitors in January may have been lower than in 2019, but their importance to the sector is underlined by the fact that they constituted the largest source of foreign visitors to Andalucía (18.7 per cent of all foreign tourists), the Canaries (29.1per cent) and the Comunidad Valenciana (28.4 per cent).

On the positive side, meanwhile, the overall decrease in visitor numbers was accompanied by a rise of 2.1 per cent in the amount of money they are calculated to have spent in Spain in January, which reached 4,779 million euros. Again, the figure relating to the UK showed a year-on-year drop, this time of 9.4 per cent, reaching 730 million euros: average daily spending by the British was 7.6 per cent higher than a year previously at 121 euros per person, with the overall decrease being due primarily to there being fewer holidaymakers from the UK and to a shorter average length of stay.

January is one of the least active months in the international tourist sector in Spain (although not in the Canaries!), but despite this the importance of tourism to the economy is such that of the 6.42 million euros spent EVERY HOUR in Spain by foreign visitors in January, just under 1 million of them came from the pockets of those coming from the UK!

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