Barcelona hopes to achieve this 2022 the figures that the tourism sector registered in pre-pandemic years. The City Council is working with this recovery scenario after last season the city fell far short of achieving 50% occupancy compared to 2019. The forecast for 2022 will depend on multiple factors, such as how long the sixth wave lasts, the emergence of new variants that again delay the end of covid, or the crisis in Ukraine, which may affect the arrival of Russian tourists.
If all these elements end up neutralizing each other, the Tourism Councilor, Xavier Marcé, who views the coming months with "reasonable optimism," assures that the city can be "quite close" this year to the occupancy levels achieved between 2015 and 2019, and not only in the last year before the pandemic, which was a record with almost 12 million visitors. For his part, the president of Turisme de Barcelona, Eduard Torres, hopes that, when all restrictions disappear, especially those affecting international mobility, with the recovery of intercontinental flights, a rebound effect will occur in the sector.
"We are recovering activity at a pace appropriate to the possibilities given to us by the pandemic and, in many aspects, at a faster pace than other cities," Marcé defends. In this sense, Barcelona has led the European ranking, along with Lisbon, in the recovery of international tourism hotel bookings. It has also been the capital that has fared best in all of Spain, considering that it is registering a greater influx of national visitors compared to before the arrival of covid, with 7.1% more this December compared to the same month in 2019.
Marcè emphasizes that tourist activity began to reactivate from May and June 2021, gaining more intensity as the summer months passed and the restrictions due to the fifth wave affecting international mobility, the main market for the city, disappeared. In this way, Barcelona did manage to achieve 50% occupancy compared to 2019 in the second half of 2021, reaching 70% during the months of November and December, until the arrival of the sixth wave.
This, added to a first semester with a low influx of visitors, without the celebration of large congresses such as the Mobile World Congress (MWC) at the beginning of the year, has meant that Barcelona has managed to attract 4.5 million visitors throughout the year, a figure that represents almost 40% of the occupation of two years ago. Tourist spending has stood at 3.7 billion euros, 66% less than in 2019.
This gradual recovery of tourists is also translating into a gradual reopening of the city's hotels. Currently, 70% of establishments are open and almost 78% of the total available places are offered. Marcé has assured that these figures will rise to 80% and 90%, respectively, in the coming month, marked on the agenda of technology sector professionals by the return of the MWC, the most important international event held in the city and which, for now, has already achieved some 10,000 hotel reservations.