Mediterranean Tourism

Facets of Socioeconomic Development and Cultural Change

Yorgos Apostolopoulos, Lila Leontidou, Philippos Loukissas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415180238
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317798378
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book comments on the complexities of Mediterranean tourism, with contributions from researchers, consultants, managers and advisors from thirteen countries. It is an excellent reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as industry practitioners, for the examination of tourism in different Mediterranean contexts.

Part I
Northern Mediterranean shores

Transformation of the mature tourist destinations

2Towards a sustained competitiveness of Spanish tourism

Vicente M. Monfort Mir and Josep A. Ivars Baidal

Introduction

In this chapter we will analyse tourism in Spain (a country whose territory's surface is approximately half a million kilometres and which has nearly forty million inhabitants), one of the most important tourist destinations in the world, greatly benefiting from its Mediterranean location and features. After briefly referring to the historical evolution of tourism in this country, we will make a profile of the resulting tourist model, directly associated to the rise of mass tourism in Western Europe. The Spanish model highlights tourism's important implications in the economic as well as in the environmental and socio-demographic contexts. From the point of view of tourism, Spain is a very rich model to study in terms of the magnitude of its tourist establishment and its great tourist attraction capacity, within the framework of massive consumption patterns.

In a context of significant changes affecting demand and tourist-production schemes, it is interesting to do research on how a first-order traditional destination adapts to these dynamics. The Spanish case offers important teaching examples and highlights factors which need correcting. This is why the future of tourism in this part of the Mediterranean faces certain risks while simultaneously having interesting opportunities at its disposal. All these aspects are subject to analysis in order to detect which are the key factors that must be taken into account if we are to maintain Spain's competitiveness in the global-tourist market.

The genesis of tourism in Spain

If we briefly look over the evolution of tourism in Spain in recent years, various periods can be seen to follow one another, periods that are different in their duration and coincide with just as many ways of understanding and practising tourism-related activity, both from the perspective of administrative intervention (what is known as tourist policy) and in its practical aspect, as it has been developed by its social and managerial main agents.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the notion of tourism was linked to the recreation of a wealthy or well-to-do minority of the population – no matter if people were dealing with trips to summer resorts in the same country or if they were referring to the reception of foreigners who showed an interest in discovering the Spanish heritage with regard to art, monuments and landscape, the heritage of historical, enlightened and romantic travellers. They were minor movements of people which hardly affected the everyday life of the areas visited, and had no influence on the national economy. Nevertheless, their incidence was increasing during certain months of the year and grew incrementally (building of residential villas on the coast, development of recreational facilities: casinos, theatres, and so forth). At that time it was already becoming clear how important the contribution of foreign currencies could become in a country lacking these resources derived from foreign trade.

In the early 1950s, the boom of European tourism, associated with the recovery of economic growth, was spread all over the western Mediterranean, while the international isolation of Franco's regime was broken. In 1951, the number of foreigners that went through the border exceeded one million: the flow of foreign currencies, so necessary for the Spanish economy, grew to considerable proportions. The new situation led the government to reconsider the status of tourism: in July 1951 it created the Ministry of Information and Tourism. Private initiative became aware of the opportunities created by the beginning of the boom in Spain, due to its proximity to origin markets, the great appeal of its resources (climate and beaches), exotism and the low price level. In 1956, the volume of hotel supply surpassed 100,000 beds; in Benidorm, a Town Development Plan was approved which considered the expansion of tourist accommodation.

In 1959, the government launched what would be known as the ‘Stabilization Plan’, which laid the foundations of a certain opening-up towards the outside with the aim of modernizing the country's economy and achieving a limited recognition for its special political reality – in this way closing the autocratic stage that it had been dragging since the Allies’ victory in World War Two. That plan allowed for the entrance of a new ruling class with other characteristics – the ‘technocrats’, whose knowledge and training turned out to be fundamental for Spain's tourist interests. Later development plans would mark the Spanish economic policy coming from the 1959 Plan, just as many Tourism Commissions would appear which would define the objectives and instruments of tourist policy (Bote and Marchena 1996: 303), obtaining, for this reason, an unprecedented recognition for tourist activity that did not continue later during the democratic period. In this context, the number of visitors increased several times, reaching more than 5 million in 1960.

The undeniable importance of tourism for the Spanish economy particularly in regard to insular and coastal regions in the Mediterranean, was reflected in the government's policies. The access to the government of a technocrat ruling class, whose mission was the orderly management of economic development within the framework of the regime's political and social rigidity, gave rise to a reorganization of ministries in July 1962, as far as the Ministry of Information and Tourism was concerned. The incoming team were prepared to encourage the regulation of private tourist activity, inside the rigid control system, from the public sector. The fields in which they were going to work included the statute of private enterprises and activities, the encouragement of promotion initiatives (both private and institutional), the promotion of hotel credits to enterprises and Town Councils, the regulation of the tourist accommodation plant (hotels and campsites), the relaunching in the construction of ‘Paradores Nacionales’ (hotels resulting from the rehabilitation of buildings considered valuable as monuments or newly-built in places of interest for tourism, a concept created in the late 1920s), promotion abroad through direct participation in international fairs and professional forums, and so on.

Nevertheless, a lack of co-ordination existed between tourist policy measures and other branches of the general policy developed by the government and the local administrations. This co-ordination would have given the Spanish tourist offer in the most often demanded areas more efficiency and quality. Instead, areas such as land and air communication infrastructures, the care of the town and landscape environment and cleaning-up networks were neglected, and a long list of facilities which were not kept in step as they should have been, in order to achieve an optimal development of the Spanish tourist product. This brought about the configuration of the offer as a uniform, mass product and, therefore, scarcely differentiated among the various coastal destinations, with the exception of some municipalities.

Much more importance was assigned to the amount of tourists being received and their immediate profitability (the yearly maximization of foreign currencies coming in as a result of this activity), than to the option of gradual and conscious selection of different products. Products of programmed quality, in accordance with the diverse carrying capacities of each tourist destination, in such a way that a diversified offer capable of meeting the needs of different types of demand with a varied spending capacity, could have been formed during the 1960s.

The Spanish tourist model

The contribution of tourism to the Spanish socioeconomic development: environmental and socio-demographic implications

The analysis of tourist magnitudes on a worldwide scale highlights the important role that Spain plays in this branch of productive activity. This situation is reconfirmed every year with the growth, both in arrival figures for international tourist travellers and in their income replica, with advances above the world's average in both cases.

Table 2.1 Main countries in terms of income and tourist arrivals

According to provisional data made public by the World Tourism Organization (WTO), corresponding to 1999, Spain possessed 7.2 per cent of the world's share of tourist income and 7.9 per cent of international traveller arrivals. These figures placed Spain in second place in the world for tourist income, simultaneously keeping its second place as a tourist destination, behind France.

After the extensive development of Spanish tourism was consolidated during the 1960s and 1970s, its growth has become more moderate, although it describes a tendency towards sustained advance. The most recent cause of instability was detected in the early 1990s, after the reduction in tourist arrivals as a result of the appreciation of the peseta in international markets. In spite of the loss of competitiveness-price that this meant, Spain has consolidated its position as a world-tourist destination, successfully competing against the more exotic destinations that have emerged in Asia and Central America and even other, nearer destinations such as the ones in the African Mediterranean and, above all, countries in Central Europe, which have vigorously incorporated themselves into the holiday panorama during the last decade. For some decades now, tourism has behaved as one of the most stable and booming activities in the Spanish economy. The assessment of the contribution of tourism to the Spanish productive system can be summarized in the analysis of the following macromagnitudes:

Table 2.2 Tourist balance of income and payments (thousand millions of pesetas)

	Year 1998	Year 1999	Rate of change 99/98 (%)
Receipts	4458	5085.1	14.1
Payments	747.2	868.9	16.3
Tourist balance	3710.8	4216.2	13.6

Source: Bank of Spain.

1 Income, payments and balance from tourism. Indicators in monetary terms indicate a clearly positive tourist balance, which has historically contributed, to a large extent, to the compensation of the structural imbalance existing in the Spanish commercial deficit.

In the context of the balance of payments of the Spanish economy the starring role played by tourist activity stands out, where the capacity to generate gradually-increasing income in the last 30 years has helped to compensate the balance on the current account and to succeed in rationalizing the Spanish trade balance.

The current account balance reflects the flow of goods and services which Spain maintains with the rest of the world.

Figure 2.1 Current account balance 1996.
Source: Bank of Spain.

In 1996, this balance showed a surplus of US$1.77 billion, which explains the rationalization provoked by the income derived from the commercialization of the different tourist destinations in Spain. The tourist balance has the capacity to finance the loss-making parties in the Spanish balance of payments. Hence we can see the strategic value that tourism has established in the heart of the Spanish economy, since it has the capacity to make contributions of economic resources in an amount sufficient to channel the necessary imports in order to maintain the process of modernization and to gain in competitiveness for its productive system. This situation has been a constant feature in the Spanish economy since the Stabilization Plan of 1959, tourist income having the capacity to cover the deficit of Spain's foreign trade in recent years.

2 Contribution of tourist activity to the GNP. The economic effects generated by tourism directly affect the activities normally referred to as ‘tourist sector’, however, many other sectorial activities would be indirectly influenced by tourist expenditure. The intersectorial nature of tourist activity is reflected in the Tabla input-output de la economía la turística española (TIOT-92, Input-Output Table of Spain's Tourist Economy). The application of the table allows the accurate quantification of tourism's real economic impact, given that, after the calculation of various multiplying coefficients, we can obtain the effects induced by the total tourist demand in the economy as a whole. In general, the tourist intersectorial multiplier is estimated at 1.71, a figure that reflects how influential tourist activity is in the whole economic system.

After the application of this methodology, which takes into account the spreading phenomenon of tourism, the contribution of total tourist production (direct and indirect) to the Spanish GNP is estimated at about 18.55 per cent for 1995, which clarifies the specialization and how strongly dependent the Spanish economy is on the tourist sector at present.

3 Employment-generating activity. One of the most spectacular effects of tourist activity is, undoubtedly, the employment opportunities it generates. The difficulties mentioned previously regarding the assessment of tourist activity have not allowed us to carry out a census that is accurate enough to express the direct and indirect figures of tourist employment rigorously. The distribution of tourist employment in 1995 is situated at 1,147,000 jobs (9.52 per cent of the country's working population), whose structure responds to the following breakdown (data calculated from the TIOT'92 tourist intersectorial multiplier): direct employment: 671,000 workers; indirect employment: 476,000 workers.

It must be kept in mind that, whereas the country's working population only grew by 2.66 per cent in the 1995-96 period, tourist activity reached an interannual variation of 5.5 per cent. However, it must be remembered that employment in tourism suffers from two worrying effects: low salaries (among other reasons due to the low special ization) and, above all, a marked temporality as a result of the high seasonality the secto...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Northern Mediterranean shores Transformation of the mature tourist destinations
• Part II Eastern Mediterranean shores A fast-growing tourist market
• Part III Southern Mediterranean shores Tourism development and Islamic fundamentalism
• Part IV Spatial reorganization of Mediterranean tourism
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index