In the midst of the Olympic hangover, when many hotels closed on weekends and some even in summer, with the Barcelona brand already launched to the world, when the potential of the tourism industry was sensed but the context of economic crisis prevailed, Mayor Pasqual Maragall had an idea. The City Council was short of resources and proposed to the private sector to match the amount allocated to tourism to encourage activity. And thus Turisme de Barcelona was born. Thirty years later, with the global massification of tourism and a pandemic, the consortium vindicates its role and rethinks its objectives. The first, prioritize conference activity.
“When the Mobile World Congress is held, the hotels are full and the people of Barcelona do not feel the stress that they suffer at other times of the year,” acknowledges the current president of Turisme de Barcelona, Eduard Torres. If thirty years ago the objective was promotion, once we were in the Top 5 of the most visited cities in the world, another scenario opens up in which the voices of citizens against tourist massification have gained weight.
"The City Council has made an effort to organize the city – such as the Pla d'Usos de Ciutat Vella or the PEUAT – but it is not enough and now we are opening a new stage that must be based on the management of space and time," Torres maintains. Decentralization and deseasonalization mark the horizon.
Business tourism was already the main one when, in 1993, the consortium was created. In fact, the Barcelona Convention Bureau is now celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Thus, according to data from the Tourism Observatory, in 1993 Barcelona registered 700,000 vacation tourists and 1,56,994 business visitors, meaning that the weight of professional tourism was then almost 64%. In 2022, vacation tourists stood at 4.9 million and professionals at 1.2 million, to which half a million more meeting tourists must be added. The attraction of new conferences – the first edition of Mobile in 2006 marked a turning point – has marked the proliferation of four and five star hotels that have gone from 46 to 186 and from 4 to 45 respectively, in these thirty years. Currently 80% of the hotel plant corresponds to one of these two categories.
“Turisme de Barcelona was a pioneering and visionary initiative in which the City Council showed great generosity by ceding executive responsibility to the private sector (through the Chamber of Commerce),” maintains Pere Duran, who directed the Municipal Board for ten years. of Turisme (precedent of the consortium) and was the first, and for fifteen years, director of Turisme de Barcelona.
“There was never a generic promotion, an attempt was made to attract tourists of different nationalities; Thus, if one market failed, it was compensated with another – Duran maintains – and we always worked to attract business tourism, the Convention Bureau was born under the umbrella of the Municipal Board and remained that way.” This entity reinforced its international weight in 2019, when its director, Christoph Tessmar, was appointed president for Spain and Portugal of the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA), in whose ranking, Barcelona was ranked that year as the first city in the world on behalf of conference participants.
Under the direction of Duran Barcelona experienced a tourist explosion. "Now the great challenge is managing tourism once it is in the city and playing our great card: convention tourism linked to strategic sectors, centralizing and singularizing ourselves in this tourism and forgetting about the rest."
Duran considers it urgent to reflect in depth on the tourism that Barcelona needs, including the cruise sector, and regrets that the pandemic parenthesis, during which everyone proposed new and more sustainable future scenarios, “has not served to nothing, it has been a collective failure.” Even so, he maintains that "today we celebrate the success of establishing Barcelona as an emblematic and world-class city."
During these thirty years, the tourist imaginary of the city has changed radically. Beyond congresses and conventions, the list of most visited monuments in 1993 and 2022 show a very different scenario, both in terms of the most visited spaces and the influx of people. Poble Espanyol, the most visited place by tourists in 1993 (1.38 million entries), falls from the list and is replaced by Park Güell, with 4.6 million visits in 2022. The Sagrada Família has multiplied by six the number of visits and the Barça Museum, by four.
The first policies to try to reduce tourist pressure in the center and work towards decentralization were launched in 2011, with the “Barcelona is much more” campaign, in which we worked together with the Barcelona Provincial Council. “We began to consider what the carrying capacity of some spaces was and we gave a boost to segmentation, with very targeted campaigns and very defined content,” recalls Jordi Portabella, councilor for tourism between 1999 and 2003 and member of the permanent Turisme de Barcelona until 2012. From that time it is the Barcelona Shopping Line or the Any de la Música, Any Gaudí or Any de la Alimentació campaigns.
During Portabella's mandate, the need to implement the tourist tax was put on the table for the first time, which was finally approved in November 2012. Since then, Barcelona has raised 253 million, of which the City Council has collected 115.3. The destination of the funds from the tax has evolved in recent years from promotion to the promotion of projects – 450 have been financed – and initiatives aimed at compensating for the externalities of mass tourism.
