The National Statistics Institute has recently found that in the first semester of 2020, almost 11 million tourists visited Spain. It’s a tragic drop from the same time last year.
Spain has been the worst hit country by this fatal virus spread.
Spain is massively dependent on tourism industry but the virus spread almost wiped out the entire sector all through June. It experienced a huge fall down of over 97 percent in regards to arrivals and spending.
El Pais newspaper has defined the first half of 2020 as the “most catastrophic semester ever recorded”.
So far this year, figures portray only 10.8 million tourists have visited the country which is 71.7 percent less than the same time in 2019. This was an astounding drop with a decline by 70.6 percent.
There were 27.3 million fewer tourists from January to June 2020, and 28.4 billion euros less in revenues.
Just 204,926 tourists from abroad had arrived in the country in June 2020. This was a drop of 97.7 percent than the same month in 2019.
In the same period, spending dropped by 98.6 percent.
Overall spending has decreased to 651 euros compared to June 2019 as those visiting the country have reduced trips to one day to an average of 5.7 days.
For national tourists, the figures increased to 920,778, bringing the total to 1,820,455 for overnight stays all through June.
These figures nevertheless show less than 10 percent of the expected totals in June 2019. Tourism contributed 14.3 percent of GDP in 2019 and fears the Spanish economy will collapse have been raised. By taking booking data into consideration, Italy has by now sold around 80 percent of the availability online. On the other hand, Spain remains stuck at 72 percent.
During the pandemic, Spain has been one of the worst hit countries and as cases begins to scale up; many cities are facing lockdown restrictions once again.
On July, the UK imposed a two-week quarantine rule or people returning to the country from Spain.
To quote the Government, “The Joint Biosecurity Centre together with Public Health England has updated their coronavirus assessments of Spain based on the latest data.”
Tags: Spain tourism
