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Nuria Triguero
Malaga
Wednesday, 28 August 2024, 11:18
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The supply and demand of non-hotel accommodation for tourists in Malaga has grown by leaps and bounds in the last five years to the point where the province is now the leader in Spain. In 2023, this type of accommodation registered almost 17.9 million overnight stays in the province. This is almost five million more than Barcelona, now second in the ranking.
In 2018, when the Spain's national statistics institute (INE) began to record the occupancy of short-stay accommodation offered on the online booking platforms, Barcelona led the nation in terms of stays in non-hotel accommodation: that year it recorded 12 million overnight stays compared to 10.2 million for Malaga.
The tide turned in 2020 and, in the light of the tourism slump caused by the pandemic, Malaga overtook Barcelona, achieving 4.6 million overnight stays compared to 3.3 million in the Catalan province. Then, in the following three years the growth of non-hotel tourism has accelerated intensely in Malaga, increasing its lead over the other regions of Spain. Therefore, while in Barcelona from 2018 to 2023 the demand for flats, tourist homes and other short-stay accommodation, hostels and rural houses has grown by just 6%, in Malaga it has increased by 75%.
This growth in non-hotel tourism was far from slowing down in Malaga in 2023 and, looking at the latest INE data, stays in this type of accommodation increased by 25% compared to the previous year in the province. It is foreign tourists who are paying for this increase: they account for 75% of overnight stays (13.4 million compared to the 4.4 million overnighting Spaniards). We will have to wait and see whether the measures now being taken to curb the proliferation of tourist accommodation in some municipalities - including Malaga city - will halt this upward trend this year.
The wide range of non-hotel accommodation in the province of Malaga is spread over five main tourist destinations. The first is Malaga city, which last year exceeded 5.2 million overnight stays. In the national ranking, the city ranks third, behind only the cities of Barcelona (10.9 million) and Madrid (9.5 million).
After Malaga comes Marbella that, with 2.5 million stays, is the sixth municipality with the most overnight stays in the whole of Spain, and the first that is not a provincial capital. The next most important tourist destinations in Malaga for this type of tourism are Benalmádena (1.6 million overnight stays), Torremolinos (1.2 million) and Fuengirola (1.1 million).
In terms of average length of stay, Fuengirola has the highest average stay in the province: 7.1 days, which places it in second place in the national ranking of tourist spots, behind only Torrevieja. Marbella and Benalmádena are between 6.5 and 7 days on average, while Torremolinos is at 5.8 days and Malaga city at 4.1.
These data belong to an experimental statistic published by the INE since 2021, the aim of which is to "complement the information of traditional occupancy field surveys of the group of tourist accommodation and other short-stay accommodation, which has a greater presence on online platforms and in which the phenomenon of the collaborative economy (the origin of these platforms) has a greater impact." This register includes a wide range of accommodation types ranging from tourist flats, tourist hostels, rural houses, as well as properties for tourist use. Hotels and campsites are not included.
The project is being developed at the European level at the initiative of Eurostat (a Directorate-General of the European Commission based in Luxembourg), which in 2020 signed a collaboration agreement with the main online booking and travel platforms for tourist accommodation (Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group and Tripadvisor) whereby it receives data from these companies on all tourist accommodation, with the exception of hotels and campsites, for all EU countries. In addition, Eurostat signed bilateral agreements with the statistical offices of the EU member states for the exchange of data from these platforms on short-stay accommodation.
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