Barcelona's cultural and leisure facilities doubled their annual visitors in 2022
23/11/2023 - 10:00h
The OTB publishes the complete report of the tourism activity in Barcelona in 2022
The Barcelona Tourism Observatory presents the full report on Tourism Activity in Barcelona 2022, a report which reflects the gradual recovery in tourism activity during that year, after the impact of Covid-19.
This report includes 4 new chapters to the previously released capsules: Meetings and trade fair activity, International positioning, Culture and leisure, and General information about Barcelona.
Other contents have been also updated with definitive data: Tourism demand, Airport and Country of residence.
Meetings tourism and trade fair activity
Despite a weak beginning of the year in terms of professional activity, in 2022, 1,639 meetings were registered in Destination Barcelona. Thus, meetings tourism was close to pre-pandemic levels, with a 94.6%-recovery over 2019.
Except for the first quarter of the year, events returned to the intrinsic pre-pandemic seasonality of meetings tourism. Most of them were held in May, June, September, October, and November, accounting for 69.6% of the meetings throughout the year. During these months, they exceeded the values of 2019.
The recovery in the number of delegates was lower than in the meetings: 84.2% compared to 2019. This was mainly due to the restrictions still in place around the world (particularly in Asia) which mainly affected the events held in the first quarter, such as the Mobile World Congress. However, 8 out of 10 meeting attendees were international.
At Fira de Barcelona, 69 events were organised and received 1.2 million visitors. As in the case of meetings, the quarters with the most events were the second and fourth quarters, which alone welcomed almost one million people.
Fira Montjuïc, with more local public, registered more than half of Fira Barcelona's events and more than half a million visitors, while Fira Granvia, with more professional events, received more than 600,000 attendees.
International positioning
Destination Barcelona recovered positions in the ranking of cruise passengers in the Mediterranean, where it ranked the top position for the first time since 2019. On the other hand, in the ranking of passengers at European airports, Barcelona Airport, achieved the 7th spot, 4 ahead of 2021, but still behind 2019 (6th).
Barcelona ranked 6th in the total overnight stays in European cities ranking, so that it improved, not only its position year-on-year, climbing 3 positions, but it also achieved a higher spot than in 2019 (7th).
Barcelona also improved its position in the GDS index in the metropolis category, achieving 7th place, and moving up one position.
Finally, the strong recovery of Destination Barcelona in the area of meetings tourism was demonstrated in the ICCA ranking, in which once again, in 2022, it claimed 4th spot in meetings and 1st in delegates. We should remind, once again, that Barcelona is the only global destination to have been in the top 5 for the past 20 years in the first ranking. Besides, historically, it has also ranked in the first position in the second ranking, occupying the first position on several occasions.
Culture and leidure
The reactivation of tourism allowed cultural, natural, and leisure facilities to recover a large part of the visitors lost during the pandemic. The 20 most visited facilities in the destination doubled the number of visitors compared to 2021, from 15.7 million to 31.9 million in just one year. 85% of the most visited sites in the Destination were located in Barcelona city.
By type of facility, places of architectural interest experienced the highest year-on-year growth, followed by users of unique transport, and museums, interpretation centres, and collections.
By geographical area, facilities in Barcelona city, which lost the most visitors during the pandemic, registered more than the double of visitors of those in 2021, while visitors to facilities in Barcelona region increased by almost 40% year-on-year.
More information: Report on Tourism Activity in Barcelona 2022
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