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Trips by Catalans within Catalonia last year amounted to almost 18.9 million journeys in 2022, with a total expenditure of 2.76 billion euros

The country offers visitors a wide range of resources and activities, as well as a favourable climate

Cat­alo­nia is a major tourist des­ti­na­tion for do­mes­tic, Eu­ro­pean and world­wide trav­ellers. The coun­try of­fers all vis­i­tors a wide range of hol­i­day re­sources and ac­tiv­i­ties, while boast­ing a favourable cli­mate that makes it a leader in cer­tain tourism seg­ments and prod­ucts.

In­deed, tourism is one of the main dri­vers of the Cata­lan econ­omy. De­spite the global health cri­sis caused by Covid-19 hav­ing a very in­tense im­pact on the sec­tor, it is now on the way to re­cov­ery, ac­cord­ing to data col­lected by the Cata­lan Tourism Agency.

The main tourism sta­tis­tics for 2022 show im­prove­ments in year-on-year terms. Al­though pre-pan­demic lev­els have not yet been reached, as a com­par­i­son with 2019 re­veals, ac­tiv­ity in the sec­tor is re­cov­er­ing.

Cat­alo­nia ended 2022 with 102,243 tourist es­tab­lish­ments reg­is­tered in the Tourism Reg­istry of Cat­alo­nia, pro­vid­ing al­most 1.2 mil­lion beds. From the year-on-year com­par­i­son, which does not in­clude shared homes, be­cause no fig­ures are avail­able for the whole of 2021 for these es­tab­lish­ments, it ap­pears that sup­ply in­creased by 5.2% and by 2.7%, re­spec­tively.

Al­most 24.9 mil­lion trav­ellers stayed at all types of es­tab­lish­ments, in­clud­ing hos­tels, with 79.9 mil­lion overnight stays. How­ever, the num­bers were still lower than in 2019, which was a record year for tourism.

Local Cata­lan tourism

Trips by Cata­lans within Cat­alo­nia amounted to al­most 18.9 mil­lion jour­neys, with a total ex­pen­di­ture of 2.8 bil­lion euros. The flow in­creased in year-on-year terms (13.0% and 26.5%, re­spec­tively). The in­flux by trip type shows that around three out of every four trips and four out of every five euros were in non-own ac­com­mo­da­tion (76.8%: 14.5 mil­lion trips, and 82.8%: 2.3 bil­lion euros), where ac­tiv­ity is grow­ing com­pared to a year ago. The av­er­age ex­pen­di­ture of Cata­lans on trips with non-own ac­com­mo­da­tion within Cat­alo­nia amounted to 157 euros per per­son and 55 euros per trip per day (11.5% and 18.5% year-on-year).

Mean­while, in 2022, Cat­alo­nia re­ceived al­most 5.3 mil­lion trips from the rest of Spain, with a total ex­pen­di­ture of 2.3 bil­lion (36.0% and 55.9% up in year-on-year terms, re­spec­tively). The av­er­age amounts were 437 euros per trip and 92 euros per per­son per day (14.6% and 33.9% year-on-year, re­spec­tively).

Labour mar­ket

It is es­ti­mated that on av­er­age in Cat­alo­nia 454,400 peo­ple worked in ac­tiv­i­ties re­lated to tourism in 2022, some 7.2% more than a year ear­lier (30,700 more peo­ple), and that rep­re­sented 12.9% of the em­ployed as a whole of the econ­omy. As for un­em­ploy­ment, 12.2% of the un­em­ployed are from the tourism sec­tor.

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