Tourism Breaking News
In an exclusive interview with Daniel Rosado Bayón, Director – Spain Tourism Office, Tourism Counsellor GCC stated that they received almost 80% of visitors as per pre-covid time. “In the first six months of the year Spain received over 30 million international visitors which is about 80% of 2019. In respect to expenditure it was about 89% as 2019. When you take UAE, we saw a spike of around 30% from UAE as pre-covid level.”
One of the key factors that matter when visiting Europe is obtaining the visa, however according to Rosado Director Spain tourism office, there is now good news to be heard very soon from the European Union. “During this summer we saw a surge in Visa requests. This goes in line with the huge come back of tourism. After two years of restrictions, this summer has become very similar to a pre-covid summer. With the spike in travelling, that some call revenge tourism, we have witnessed how different sectors, from aviation to hospitality or infrastructures, faced difficulties to cope with this sudden surge. Not long ago there was not too many people travelling, and now we have more than before, as people have realized that we only live once and that we need to do the things we like better now than before. Visa issuance is no different, the amount of request is so high that they cannot be processed all in time. Resources are limited and given the importance of controlling the borders of the countries the visa process cannot be speed up. Having said this, Visa offices have experienced a high demand but are doing a very good job on processing as much as possible. Spain is one of the European countries that more visas are issued, and even during the pandemic we never stopped. Also this year more cases of visa shopping and other illicit behaviors, which are not helpful as they are time consuming. Probably after this summer the situation will come back to a more regular flow of requests. Nonetheless the European Union is working on different projects to come up with faster and simpler procedures. So the EU is working on the electronic visa, which will highly speed up the process, although this is still a project. We also have to point out that visas can be applied well in advance, so once you know your travelling dates you can go well in advance and get the visa. And there are also some works on the improvement of the databases and new IT systems being developed and implemented soon, for a better control of entries, which will help to speed up the whole process.”
