Spanish digital tourists continue to choose Portugal as their favourite destination

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Spanish citizens continue to choose Portugal as their favourite destination to spend their holidays.

In addition, the report provided by the Spanish Association of Digital Economy  (Adigital), Spanish digital travellers have resumed international travel to 2019, before the spread of the Coronavirus and its new variants, despite being 21 per cent more expensive compared to domestic travel, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

Adigital together with the technology consultancy, the Cocktail Analysis introduced the study named ‘Evolution of the Spanish digital traveller (2019-2022)’ in order to find changes in habits caused by the spread of the Coronavirus.

It revealed that Portugal is the main destination when it comes to online bookings for Spaniards wishing to travel abroad. It also showed that within Spain, Bendorm, as well as Salou are among the most booked travel destinations.

The study notes that Brexit also impacted significantly the decrease in UK travel, bringing also into light the fact that Spanish digital passengers have regained the weight of bookings abroad in the post-pandemic period, even though the average cost of a trip in other countries is a total of 21 per cent higher than that of a trip within Spain.

According to the study, Spanish digital tourists up to this point travel as much outside Spain as they did before the spread of COVID-19.

In 2020, during the easing of COVID-related restrictions phase, the level of reservations in the passenger’s continents of origin accounted for a notable increase, with nine out of ten reservations made in Spain.

However, in 2021 and 2022, there was registered a decrease again, thus diving destinations in Spain and outside the country 80/20 according to the study, “which means that there is no loss of confidence regarding foreign tourism”, the study says.

Despite the fact that Spanish digital tourists chose European countries the most (66 per cent) when planning to travel abroad, there is still a certain transfer of digital tourists to distant Spanish-speaking territories, such as Central America as well as Caribbean, which, despite the fact that they continue to remain secondary destinations, they manage to double their share from just five per cent in 2019 to 11 per cent last year.

The report also revealed that there was noted a surge in the Middle East as well as North Africa, or by four per cent and six per cent more specifically, despite the instability of some of these markets.

In addition, the report notes that in the last few years, especially during the pandemic, the closest countries to Spain; Portugal, Andorra, Italy and France received the highest number of Spanish bookings.

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