Impressive headline. Is always easy to get people excited by throwing in something like ‘record’ but the devil is in the detail as ever.
Before the expat businesses all start getting excited it is worth looking at where the majority of this spend went.
Basically it was spent in the ‘old favourites’ of Catalunya (11.27€ billion) Canary Islands (10.12€ billion) and the Balearic Islands (9.46€ billion).
And as for trends: package tours of self-catering were the two main ‘winners’.
32% of forign tourists came into the country on package tours and spent 16.873 billion euros, 13.5% more than last year; whereas the other 68% who organised their own travel and accommodation spent 35.92 billion euros, 5.5% more.
63.5% of travellers opted for hotel stays, an increase of 8.7% on last year, whereas the remaining 36.5% chose other types of accommodation, which also saw bookings up by 6.6%.