Practically all the cruise passengers who stop in Barcelona for a few hours and visit the city set foot on the Rambla and its surroundings, where they spend an average of one hour and five minutes. Of these 65 minutes, 48 are walking. The second place that does not fail is Plaza Catalunya, followed by Passeig de Gràcia, where these tourists spend half an hour. The Sagrada Família closes the top route for cruise passengers, as confirmed by the most accurate map of their movements made to date.
Under the umbrella of the Visitmob project (led by the Rovira i Virgili University), the researchers distributed 800 geolocator devices to monitor all the movements that cruise passengers in transit make during the average five hours they visit the city, from the moment they leave the port and until his return. The result puts numbers and specific scenarios to a reality already known in the city, and thus becomes a useful tool for managing visitor flows and reducing less unwanted effects.
How do cruise passengers move? In the first section, from the ship to the port exit, the most used means of transport is the Cruise Bus. This blue bus (3 euros one trip and 4.5 euros round trip) connects the cruise terminals, in the Adossat dock, with the Barcelona dock, next to the World Trade Center (WTC). This bus is used by 70.5% of cruise passengers, while 20.2% prefer to travel by taxi and 7.4% do so on foot.
Once in the WTC, the tour of the city begins. From the GPS data it can be deduced that cruise passengers spend an average of two hours and 25 minutes walking around Barcelona, which is slightly more than half of the visit time. The promenade inevitably passes through the Rambla and the adjacent streets, forced to absorb all this flow. In addition to walking, the Tourist Bus (with a stop at the WTC, next to the Cruise Bus) is consolidated as the means of transport most used by cruise passengers (32.8% choose it), followed by the taxi (18, 7%), the metro (16.8%) and, quite far away, the urban bus, which is used by 5.5% of cruise passengers.
GPS devices draw a very clear map in which La Rambla and Ciutat Vella take the cake. The second most frequented area for these tourists, who squeeze everything they can out of the little more than five hours on average they visit, is the Sagrada Família and its surroundings, through which 63.1% of the group pass. Quite a distance away are other more specific objectives such as Barceloneta, Park Güell and Camp Nou. From the information that emerges from the surveys carried out, these options fit with the fact that approximately half of the cruise passengers have already been to the city before and visit other spaces beyond Ciutat Vella. 78% of those surveyed affirm that their objective is a space of cultural or recreational interest, followed by walking aimlessly (46%), shopping (37%) and eating in a restaurant (35%). Only 7% claim to have rested in a public space during their visit and only 5% decide to go to the beach. The study also details the profile of these cruise passengers and their average cost of 43 euros per person. By nationality, the Americans are the ones that are above this average, spending 52 euros per person, and the British are the ones that spend the least, 35 euros on average.
The mobility of cruise passengers is just one of the sections of the Visitmob project, which also tracks the movements of tourists who stay overnight in the city and one-day visitors who stay outside of Barcelona. As part of the Barcelona Ciència 2020-2023 plan, the project is promoted by Barcelona City Council and co-financed by La Caixa Foundation. Aaron Gutiérrez, a member of the URV's Grup de Recerca en Anàlisi Territorial i Estudis Turístics (Gratet), directs the Visitmob, in which researchers from the UOC, ISGlobal, UIC, Ostelea and Eurecat also collaborate.
