Judith Montréal Garriga (CaixaBank Research) | Global international tourism has grown significantly in recent quarters and is recovering to pre-pandemic levels. According to UN tourism indicators, in the first quarter of 2024, international tourism was only 3% below 2019 levels. The Spanish tourism sector was one of the first to recover, making Spain the second country, after Turkey, among the world’s top 10 tourist destinations to exceed pre-pandemic international tourist numbers. Thus, with 85 million tourists, Spain surpasses its own previous record and takes second place in the international ranking of tourist arrivals for 2023, behind France (100 million) and ahead of the United States (66.5 million).
Beyond visitor numbers, the main challenge for the tourism sector is to continue to grow in a sustainable and balanced way. To this end, it is important to pay attention to other areas of a structural nature, so as to be able to properly diagnose and continue to strengthen the strengths of the sector, as well as the weak points that need to be addressed to make growth sustainable in the long term. A good starting point for such a diagnosis is the Travel and Tourism Development Index (TTDI), a benchmark index that compares 119 countries to measure the set of factors and policies that allow a sustainable and resilient development of the tourism sector. According to the 2024 TTDI, the Spanish tourism sector occupies a very prominent position in the global rankings, second only to the United States and ahead of Japan and France, and has moved up one place compared to the previous 2022 edition.
See the United Nations World Tourism Indicators | World Tourism Statistics (unwto.org). See the article “Spanish tourism sector will continue to grow strongly in 2024-2025” from the Tourism Sector Report for the second half of 2024. Spain is also the second largest country in the world in terms of international tourism expenditure, behind the United States and ahead of the United Kingdom. The TTDI is an index created by the World Economic Forum. The second edition of this index, an evolution of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI), published since 2007, was published in 2024.
The TTDI is made up of five sub-indexes, each covering a different pillar (17 in total), among which Spain stands out in terms of its cultural and natural resources, its environment (in particular health and hygiene, safety and security, ICT connections and workforce) and most of the infrastructure relevant to the tourism sector (the quality of airport infrastructure and the quality of hotel facilities stand out). On the other hand, the Travel & Tourism Environment sub-index is disadvantaged by the price competitiveness pillar, where Spain ranks 94th, tied with France (102nd), Italy (105th) and Portugal (93rd), but this is due to the presence of countries with high price competitiveness (Turkey, for example, ranks 40th in this area).
According to the TTDI, the area with the greatest room for improvement in the Spanish tourism sector is sustainability (Spain ranks 42nd in this sub-index). Among the different sustainability aspects taken into account (environmental, socio-economic and demand sustainability), the demand area has the lowest score. Specifically, the aspects to improve are the still high seasonality (improved compared to 2019, but still high in international comparison) and the high geographical concentration of tourism to cultural and natural sites.
