The 34th edition of the International Tourism Trade Fair, FITUR came to an end on Sunday, January 26, 2014 while surpassing all expectations.
With the final figures yet pending, the increase in the number of trade visitors over the first three days will come to between 3% and 5%, based on a figure of more than 120,000 members of the industry from 100 countries. Furthermore, on Saturday, the first day on which the event opened to the general public, FITUR witnessed a 7% increase in its number of visitors, which places the final forecast regarding the total number of people by the end of today at around 220,000 visitors. For the City of Madrid this represents an economic injection valued at more than 180 million euros.
The trade event organised by IFEMA was preceded by the announcement of record figures for Spanish tourism, figures which place Spain in third position in the world ranking in terms of number of foreign tourists (ahead of China) and in second place in the ranking in terms of tourism revenue. The event itself featured a packed and intense working agenda consisting of thousands of meetings, contacts, agreements and business opportunities amongst the nearly 9,000 companies taking part at FITUR from 165 countries.
In relation to the digital world, where FITUR serves as a key point of reference within the tourist industry social media (some way ahead of other grand international tourism events), the Madrid trade show attracted 71,000 followers on Facebook, 33,000 on Twitter, 7 thousand on Linkedin and another 7,000 on the largest Russian-speaking network, KONTAKTE. Furthermore, this staging of the trade show managed to generate 76,000 tweets on FITUR, almost twice the number recorded at its last event. The number of messages with the #Fitur hashtag came to 52,000, with a peak of 17,000 on the event's opening day. This made FITUR a National Trending Topic throughout its five-day duration, whilst it emerged as the leading Retweet for eight consecutive hours on the first day.
For its part, the FITUR App witnessed 1,775 downloads at the Apple Store, emerging as the second highest download at a national level within the business category. The trade fair witnessed 1,715 Android downloads. In total, throughout the duration of FITUR, some 277,000 impressions took place.
