Tourism GDP surpassed the pre-pandemic level by 2.7% in the third quarter of 2022 due to the greater impact of the withdrawal in demand from dams during the pandemic years, which offset the adverse geopolitical and macroeconomic conditions that occurred in recent months, from according to the quarterly report “Perspectives of Tourism” issued by Exceltur, which was presented this Tuesday at a press conference.
In his speech, the Executive Vice-President of Exceltur, José Luis Zorda, highlighted that the desire to travel this summer overflowed with many last-minute sales”, despite the cost of promoting the reduction of margins and accumulated business results for costs that far exceeded those anticipated.
In addition, the Director of Studies and Research at Exceltur, Oscar Pirelli, stated that the balance of summer tourism results was again affected by a strong increase in operating costs, which increased by an average of 20%: energy (+32.8% ), supply (+18.1%) and employment (+10.4%).
This contrasts with the increase in hotel rates, by 8.4%, which puts the difference with costs by more than 10 percentage points. Added to this are operational problems due to the difficulty in accessing trained personnel, which “prevented the transfer of greater demand force and partial price improvement for margins and results”, according to Pirelli.
In terms of employment in tourism, the Social Security branches in September were 1.1% higher than in 2019, although still lower than the rest of the Spanish economy (+5.6%).
However, Exceltur highlights a sharp increase in stable employment, with the proportion of temporary tourists rising from 30.4% in February to 11% in September, reflecting an “important corporate effort to provide greater stability to its employees”.
As for the most preferred activities in summer, hotels are the most preferred (+9.2%) and within these coastal resorts (+9.9%) better than urban hotels (+7.3%)), as well as leisure activities (+4.9%), thanks to the good performance of golf courses (+11.9%), theme parks (+8.9%) and, to a lesser extent, museums (+3.7% ).
For its part, transport is approaching pre-pandemic levels (-1.1%), with Car Rental “a little worse than expected” (-5.1%) and agencies registering the longest delays. (-11.1%).