At the beginning of 2021, the tourist activity in Destination Barcelona keeps experiencing important changes due to Covid-19. Despite the slight rebound in it during the Christmas period, when some mobility measures were relaxed, the latest data show a new drop in the tourism sector caused by the new restrictions to fight the disease.

Accommodation offer

In January 2021, the accommodation capacity in Destination Barcelona has kept diminishing: by the end of 2021, only 4 out of 10 available bed supplies in 2019 were still open.

This reduction of the accommodation offer was mainly due to the massive closure of hotel establishments, especially acute in Barcelona city,

Tourism demand

The tourism accommodation demand fell sharply at the beginning of 2021, following the trend of the previous months, in the whole of Destination Barcelona. After the easing of restrictive measures during the Christmas period, when there was a slight upturn in tourist demand, the activity has practically stopped again during Jaunary with the new mobility restrictions.

The fall in the tourism demand has been different depending on the analyzed type of accommodation: hotel establishments have experienced the greatest decrease, followed by campsites and rural tourism, which have shown greater resilience with lower falls than hotel establishments in number of tourists.

National tourism remains dominant in all kinds of accommodation: 4 out of 10 in hotel establishments, 9 out of 10 in campsites and 100% in rural tourism.

Infrastructures

In January, the loss of passengers in Barcelona airport reached -87.9% compared to previous year, which means almost 3 million passengers fewer than in January 2019, a follow-on of the losses experienced during 2020 (-75.8% YoY var.).

In Barcelona Port, Covid-19 caused a total interruption of the cruise activity. Thus, the accumulative drop in the number of cruise ship passengers in 2020 was over -90% and it is estimated that the destination lost almost 3 million visitors arriving by this means of transport.

As for ferry passengers, their drop was more moderate, with a loss of around -55%.

Tourist profile

The Spanish tourists have been, once again, on the top position of the ranking of the origin of tourists staying in hotel establishments in Barcelona city in January 2021, followed by the French and the Italian tourists.

The dominance of the Spanish market in Barcelona city is confirmed with the data of the presence of mobile devices in the municipality: the Spanish mobile devices (excluding those of the residents or usual visitors) keep being the majority, while the international remain quite far from the registered ones before the pandemic.

As for the ranking of countries from which passengers fly to Barcelona Airport, at the beginning of 2021, the increase in the proportion of national flights passengers keeps being noteworthy. The French flight passengers have occupied the second place on the ranking, although quite far from the domestic ones. These have been followed by passengers traveling from Morocco and Germany. The imposed measures to contain the British variant of Covid-19 have caused the UK to fall to the seventh position in the ranking.

Job market

Despite the lack of disaggregated data for the job market during the last quarter of 2020, it must be reminded that these data show the number of companies and Social Security affiliates, which do not take into account the number of workers (self-employed and employees) affected by temporary lay-off plans.

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With the analysis of these five thematic areas, which offer a transversal vision of the sector, the Observatory of Tourism in Barcelona updates the monitoring of the tourism activity data in three geographical areas: Barcelona city, Barcelona region and Destination Barcelona.

More information: Destination Barcelona - Latest monitoring data on tourist activity