Feria Internacional de Turismo 2025
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SUR / P. Martínez
Madrid
Friday, 24 January 2025, 13:18
Large delegations from across the Spanish tourist industry have been flocking to Madrid this week for the annual Fitur travel trade fair. Their focus at this big event is traditionally the domestic market as well as Spanish-speaking customers.
As usual, there were many representatives from the Andalusian tourist industry looking to build contacts and market their products, including from Malaga province and the Costa del Sol.
Speaking on the opening day, local tourist leaders took the customary opportunity to take stock of the year gone by and look forward to the year ahead. But this year, as well as the usual talk of the volume of tourists who are expected to visit, there was much more mention of the need for quality visitors and to attract them with their promotional campaigns to lesser visited parts of the area and at quieter times of year.
Juanma Moreno, president of the Junta de Andalucía, celebrated the historic 2024 performance of his region's tourism industry and said the region was looking forward to an even higher figure of 37 million visitors in 2025.
Speaking from the Andalucía stand, Moreno was also keen to stress that objectives for 2025 were not just about the quantity of visitors. He highlighted last year's record number of visitors (36.2 million), which was an increase of 5.5%, and its contribution to a revenue of 30 billion euros for the region, up 13.3%.
These figures, Moreno said, show that the strategy of growing in quality rather than quantity is working, explaining that "revenue grew twice as much as the number of visitors" - "a clearly positive figure".
Moreno added that the average tourist "spent around 82 euros a day, 5.5% more than in 2023 and 23% more than in 2019". The past year also saw 400,000 jobs created for local people in the region, Moreno said, which also made it the best year yet in terms of employment.
The regional president went on to say: "We have turned the fair into what it should be; a business exchange centre and a key space to position Andalucía as a preferred destination that has managed to diversify and break seasonality." Inland Jaén, in particular, was the province that gained the most tourists last year, with an increase of 14%.
"These figures don't happen by chance. It is time to make changes to improve and to generate more wealth and quality employment. They are the result of intelligent promotion in search of the tourist we are most interested in: the one who spends the most and who travels outside high season; a tourist who strengthens an industry that is more sustainable, more technology-led and better distributed over time and territory," he said.
To demonstrate this, Moreno said the number of visitors during high season grew by 4%, compared to an even greater increase of 10% between January and March.
Meanwhile, for the Costa del Sol in particular, there was an emphasis at Fitur this week on winning back visitors from Spain, which have declined in numbers.
"They are the ones who have built the destination," said Francisco Salado of the Costa del Sol tourist board. "We are not worried and I am convinced that, once the purchasing capacity of the domestic market grows, [national tourists] will continue to come, because we have a great destination which is worth the money," added Salado.
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