The terrorist attacks in Madrid - unlike the attacks in the USA - did not affect Spain's tourism sector at all. In March of this year, the Spanish capital was visited by more tourists than last year. As Gazeta.Ru reports, Spain hopes that the trend will continue throughout the year.
September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of the most global and protracted tourism crisis in the last 20 years: worldwide tourism fell by 1.3%, and American airlines, left without passengers, faced a real threat of bankruptcy. To this day, the US tourism industry has not fully recovered its lost positions.
Events in Spain after the terrorist attacks in Madrid on March 11 of this year are developing in the opposite way. Tourism in the country has hardly suffered. As José Luis Soreda, executive vice-president of the Spanish tourism alliance Exceltur, stated, Spain avoided the "negative effects of the March 11 explosions and maintains cautious optimism for the rest of 2004." According to Exceltur, in the first quarter of this year, the vast majority of enterprises that are somehow involved in the tourism business increased their sales. In transport, there are 99.5%, in car rental offices 98.7%; 57.6% of travel agencies, 50% of leisure and entertainment companies, and 42.2% of tourist accommodation enterprises increased sales. Even Madrid did not suffer from the outflow of tourists.
The data from Exceltur is confirmed by the National Statistics Institute of Spain (INE). According to its data, the number of tourists who stayed in Madrid hotels in March grew by 7.11% compared to March of last year (but it should be noted here that a year ago tourist activity was in decline due to the start of military operations in Iraq).
Meanwhile, the average amount of time spent by visitors in Spanish hotels in the first quarter decreased slightly - to 3.2 days from 3.3 in 2003. However, this trend has been observed over the past six years.
The main part of the increasing flow of tourists comes from the Spaniards themselves. "National demand is the biggest engine of Spanish tourism," says José Luis Soreda. However, at the beginning of the year, growth was also observed among foreign tourists - in February-March it amounted to 8.8%. In March, however, an outflow of foreigners was recorded - 0.1%.
Things are even worse, at first glance, with reservations of Spanish hotels in May-June, which fell by 13% compared to last year. Meanwhile, INE experts believe that the reason for this is that tourists have taken a wait-and-see position and prefer to book a hotel not in advance, but on the eve of the trip.