Promotion and communication of the attributes of Spain’s tourism brand, as well as the allocation of human, financial and technical resources for promotion purposes, is not sufficiently tailored to the characteristics of each target market.
Supply-side and Destinations
The section analyses the main characteristics of the tourism supply of destination Spain, from the point of view of tourism resource and product.
Strengths:
Great quantity and variety of infrastructure suitable for tourism use.
World leader in seaside-resort tourism, well established and featuring strongly in the tour operation supply, acting as a European benchmark at the service and infrastructure level.
Great diversity and variety of resources that enrich cultural and natural tourism: Spain ranks 2nd and 35th out of 139 countries in the study “The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2011” in terms of cultural and natural resources, respectively. (World Economic Forum, 2011).
Accessibility of nearly all destinations thanks to thoroughgoing development of the transport industry and infrastructure, mainly by land and air. Good climate, high level of law and order and first rate healthcare and assistance services.
Weaknesses:
The downward spiralling or freezing of traditional seaside-resort tourism prices exerts a growing pressure on costs, with a knock on effect on service quality; this eats into profits and therefore reduces ploughback investment in the modernisation of establishments. In 2011 hotel prices fell by over 9% on 2007. (INE, 2011)
Heavy lopsidedness of Spain’s tourism supply in favour of seaside-resort tourism, now showing signs of flagging but still dominating over the other categories like urban, cultural, internal, rural, MICE, enogastronomic tourism et al.
Heavy seasonality of seaside-resort tourism. The characteristics of this category of tourism makes it difficult to spread the tourism activity more evenly round the rest of the year (except in the Canary Isles), with all the concomitant problems of sustainability.
High environmental impact of the Spanish tourism sector, Spain coming 47th out of 139 countries in the study The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2011 in relation to the sustainability of T&T industry development. (World Economic Forum, 2011)
Low innovation investment in tourism firms: in companies of the hotel trade (CNAE [National Classification of Economic Activities] 55 and 56) the innovation rate is 0.15 as compared to 0.86 in the service sector and 1.48 in industry. (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2010)
Failure to bring local-government financing distribution into line with the particular traits of municipalities with a high proportion of floating population in relation to the fixed population.
Dispersion of service standards due to the highly scattered nature of the tourism industry and the majority proportion of SMEs.
Low integration of publicly managed culture and nature assets with the tourism sector. These assets, which could be crucial in helping Spain’s tourism stand out from its competitors, are not properly integrated into the distribution outlets.
Alignment of public-private stakeholders
This section analyses the alignment of the public services and tourism policy with the needs of the business sector.