September 2019. Although some Pitiusan hoteliers and restoration enterprises express concern, the season has gone swimmingly, or so the tourist spending numbers indicate, totaling a whopping 2,913 million euros, a new all-time high.
October 2020. The pandemic has caused widespread devastation. Summer could not have gone any worse, as evidenced by the summer’s lowest-ever visitor spending of 470 million euros. Finally, we should rejoice: the presence of that figure is a miracle; otherwise, it could have been a completely blank summer.
September 2021. The recovery is underway, but this does not mean that the figures of two years ago, those of normalcy, will be equaled. Our primary market, the British market, is dying as a result of Boris Johnson’s efforts to make it impossible for his citizens to visit us. And this is seen in visitor expenditure, which totals just 1,560 million euros. This is €1,353 million less than was spent in 2019, or 46.4 percent less. This proportion illustrates the immensity of what we are experiencing, but some regard the glass as half empty, while others see it as half full: for some, it indicates that we are capitulating, while for others, it signifies the rebirth of a destiny that has endured a true martyrdom.
Those with a glass-half-full outlook will be pleased with how September performed: significantly better than projected, to the point of regaining some of the lost territory. If cumulative spending (from January to August) was 49 percent lower than a year earlier, it was down by 2.6 percentage points 30 days later, which is not bad. It totaled €347.5 million, or €127 million less than in 2019, or 26.7 percent less than in August.
Of the main tourist markets, that of Spain is the only one that has improved its records compared to those of 2019
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.