A resident of Benidorm has warned that Spain’s tourism industry “might” be on the brink of collapse.
Ana, who runs the popular YouTube channel ‘Benidorm by Ana’, regularly updates her 17,000 subscribers with news and insights from the holiday hotspot.
In a recent video, she revealed that despite it being off-season, hotels in Benidorm were 90% full in September, a figure that “no one expected”. “The places are still really busy, the bars, restaurants, cafeterias,” she said.
However, Ana also highlighted recent Spanish news headlines predicting a potential “collapse” in tourism. She pointed out one phrase in particular in the article she looked at – “die of success”.
Ana said: “This is a typical Spanish phrase, ‘die of success’, that [something’s] so, so, so successful that it’s not even good any longer. This might be the case. Only in August, around 11million people arrived in Spain, and up until now, up until October month, there has been around 64million tourists here in our country.”
She noted that in August alone, around 11 million people arrived in Spain, and up until October, there had been approximately 64 million tourists in the country. Ana suggested that Spain’s approach to tourism, which often “prioritises quantity over quality in some places”, could be part of the problem.
She added: “Spain was always tracking the number of how many tourists arrive, and a lot of places had very cheap holidays, like drinking stag/hen party holidays, people were coming in crowds but as a result it’s not as good as it seemed at first.
“Because spending is not as high and having so many people makes extra work and effort for cleaning services, for staff of the tourism industry in general. So it’s not as good as it seemed.”
Ana also weighed in on the anti-tourism protests across a range of Spanish cities and holiday spots, where locals have expressed discontent over rising rents caused by properties being snapped up for tourist accommodation. She suggested the protests have started to “slow down”, a shift she finds understandable considering the onset of Spain’s “quieter season”.
Ana added: “All I’m going to say is that these protests did not affect tourism at all, because we’re hitting record numbers!”