The data for the month of July made public by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) confirm the recovery of the tourism sector in Barcelona. Last month closed with more than a million visitors staying in the city's hotels and apartments for tourist use. However, the figures corresponding to July 2022 are still 12.7% below those registered in the same month of 2019, a year of records in tourism.
Regarding overnight stays, they were close to 3 million, 4.4% below the 2019 records. In the first seven months of 2022, 5.4 million have passed through legal tourist accommodation in Barcelona of visitors, who have consumed some 16 million overnight stays.
The Councilor for Tourism, Xavier Marcé, stressed that "we continue to achieve the strategic objectives linked to tourism that we had set for ourselves in recent years". "We have worked hard - added Marcé - to overcome the pandemic and to strengthen the Barcelona model by betting on quality and sustainability, for example reinforcing all tourism linked to culture, encouraging longer stays and making Barcelona keep its international appeal intact while also receiving more tourists from the rest of Spain.”
International tourists account for 82% of the total, which means that Barcelona is the leading city in this regard, ahead of Madrid, Palma and Seville. The United States is once again the main issuing market, with more than 100,000 visitors, followed by the United Kingdom, with 63,000, France, Italy and Germany. In contrast, the Asian markets have still not recovered: visitors from China and Japan are, respectively, 70 and 80% less than in 2019.
Despite the weight that international visitors have in Barcelona tourism, it should be noted that the number of visitors from other parts of Spain is 7.4% higher than that registered in July 2019, with a total of 128,546 tourists.
The hotel occupancy rate in the past stood at 79.2%, only 3 points less than in July 2019 and practically all the establishments, which in many cases remained closed for long months, have reopened their doors.
With regard to cruises, they are only 3% below the values of July 2019. Two out of three of the 347,000 cruise passengers who passed through Barcelona last month traveled with ships based in the Catalan capital. At the airport, with more than 4.4 million passengers, traffic was 17.3% lower than in the same period in 2019. However, this year's total already exceeds, in just seven months, the total for 2021 .
