Simon Hunter
MORE AND MORE American tourists are choosing Spain for their vacation destination, with the number of visitors from the United States arriving on these shores rising by 17.4% in the year so far compared to the same period in 2022.
That’s according to the latest figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE), and reported today by Spanish daily El Pais.
From January to July, a total of 1.8 million people from the United States made a visit to Spain, compared to 1.1 million in the same months a year previously.
“The US market has an important value for our tourist sector,” said the Industry, Trade and Tourism minister, Hector Gomez.
The UK, France and Germany, in that order, remain the biggest markets for tourism to Spain, but the US is catching up and is currently in sixth position.
In June alone, 546,093 US visitors arrived, which is the best figure seen since 2015 when the current INE data series began.
Most American visitors choose Catalunya as their destination, accounting for 41% of the total, followed by the Madrid region, with 27%.
Another piece of good news for the Spanish tourism sector is the amount of money that US visitors spend. A report from Turespaña, the official government tourism agency, states that American travellers have ‘a considerably higher purchasing power than the average US traveller’, and that they also spend a longer time on average on their vacations.
In 2022, the 2.78 million American visitors to Spain spent €5.3 billion, which was 6% of the total. This places them as the fourth-biggest spenders among other nationalities, despite being the sixth biggest in terms of volume of visitors.
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