Spanish Tourism Rebounds

Forward Keys, which monitors future travel patterns by analyzing ~70m booking transactions a day, crunching more daily traveller data than anyone else, is seeing 6.3 percent growth in bookings for international departures from Spain during the first quarter of 2015.

Olivier Jager, Co-founder and CEO, Forward Keys, commented: “We are seeing highly encouraging booking trends. Spanish outbound bookings for travel in February are up by 10.7 percent and bookings for March are currently up by 46.5 percent compared to the equivalent time last year. This tells us that travellers are booking earlier and/or that there will likely be a bigger volume of departures in the first quarter of 2015. Whichever way you see it, these numbers are grounds for optimism.”

Looking at the top destinations for Spanish outbound, most countries are up on where they were at the same time last year. The big winners are the Middle East and Latin America. Bookings to the UAE are 41 percent up on last year, no doubt thanks to increased flight connectivity between Dubai and Spain, as well as various leisure and business events in the Gulf in January.

Bookings for Chile and Argentina also show a substantial increase compared to last year, up by 23.8 percent and 17.9 percent respectively, which can most likely be explained by a new code-share agreement between the Spanish national airline Iberia and the Latin American carrier TAM that makes it easier for Spanish travellers to go to South America.

The promising start to 2015 follows a recovery in 2014. Overall departure from Spain grew 3.2 percent last year, a welcome rebound from the 2012 global economic crisis, where yearly departures fell 6.2 percent from 2011.

Among the top destinations in 2014, the notable improvers were Turkey up 14 percent, the USA up 11 percent, Portugal up 9 percent, Germany up 7 percent and the UK up 5 percent.