After suffering from restrictions caused by the pandemic for almost two years, the tourism market in Gran Canaria is progressively recovering with a huge increase in the number of visitors in the past few months. The Canary Islands received 30% of the total number of tourists that came to Spain in January, and Gran Canaria, with 256,000 visitors, showed a recovery of 63% compared to January 2020 and 60% compared to January 2021.
The markets that are currently performing the best are the French and the Dutch, with a growth in the number of tourist arrivals of 138% over the year 2020 and 85% over the year 2021, while the drop compared to 2019, a year among the best in the Canarian tourism industry, is only 22% for the French market and 46% in the case of the Netherlands.
“The data indicates that we are on the right track. The Canary Islands received 30% of all international tourists that came to Spain in January, and Gran Canaria represents 9% of the total of this national statistic.
In addition, the island was the preferred destination for customers staying in apartments, according to the INE, with 619,000 overnight stays and an occupancy of over 68% of those available," said the Minister of Tourism for Gran Canaria, Carlos Alamo.
Alamo said he was satisfied with the response of the French and Dutch markets. “An important effort has been made by the entire sector with an evident improvement in connectivity with airports in the Netherlands and France, and we have seen a good response from these markets, along with others close by such as Belgium.”
“They are also high-spending customers who show a clear interest in complementary island products for the sun and the beach, such as active tourism and gastronomy," he explained.
GERMANY STILL LEAD THE WAY OVERALL:
Although the January tourism figures represents an overall loss of 36% compared to January 2020 and close to 40% less than January 2019, the data is not negative according to Alamo. “These data can be considered better than initially expected. On the one hand, we see that those 256,000 visitors put a stop to the upward streak of losses observed since March 2021, where every month we were recovering clients, but if we consider the effects of the cancellations that we suffered in December and January as a consequence of the sixth wave of the pandemic, these figures indicate that we are on the path to recovery.”
The main sending countries of Gran Canaria in 2021 were Germany (with 407,000 tourists), the Nordic countries (274,000), the United Kingdom (187,000) and the Netherlands (127,000). In total, 1,790,000 tourists arrived in Gran Canaria in 2021, 34% more than in 2020 and 58% less than in 2019.
Spending by Dutch clients in 2021 doubled that of 2020. In 2019, these tourists spent 247 million euros on the island. This income fell in 2020 to 72.3 million, but has increased by 96% in the last year to reach 141 million. In fact, tourist spending by customers from the Netherlands in the last quarter of 2021 reached 70 million euros, which was higher than the 64 million euros spent by these customers in the last quarter of 2019, prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
