Tourism direct GDP (2023) | Tourism direct employment (2025) | Travel exports (2024) |
|---|---|---|
6.0% of total GDP (up 0.2 percentage points since 2022) | 13.4% of total employment (down 0.1 percentage points since 2024) | 48.4% of total service exports (up 1.2 percentage points since 2023) |
OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2026
National tourism strategy: Spain Tourism 2030 Strategy
Responsible government agency: Ministry of Industry and Tourism
National tourism budget: EUR 277.1 million (2023)
Key tourism policy priorities and actions:
Transforming and renewing tourism destinations – Strengthening the management capacity of destinations and improving collaborative multi-level governance
Promoting balanced co-existence between residents and visitors – Improving social cohesion in destinations and utilising environmental actions to improve resident perceptions of tourism.
Enhancing labour conditions and talent development – Addressing challenges related to working conditions and worker well-being while strengthening the tourism skills necessary for the green and digital transitions.
Tourism is a key sector of the Spanish economy and an important driver of socio-economic development. Tourism directly accounted for 6.0% of GDP in 2023. Travel exports represented 48.4% of total service exports in 2024, an increase of 1.2 percentage points from 2023, and confirming tourism’s strong contribution to Spain’s balance of payments. In 2025, tourism directly employed 2 975 000 registered workers, representing 13.4% of the total workforce, and an increase in the number of people employed in tourism of 1.9% compared to 2024.
International tourism continued its upward trajectory in 2025, with arrivals reaching a record 96.8 million (provisional data), up 3.2% from 2024 levels. The United Kingdom (19.7%), France (13.2%) and Germany (12.4%), together, accounted for nearly half of the total international arrivals.
Domestic tourism showed signs of stabilisation. In 2024, domestic arrivals totalled 138.3 million, a slight decrease of 0.8% compared to 2023, while total nights spent reached 634.3 million, 1.5% below the previous year.
Overall, recent data indicate that Spain has consolidated its recovery and continues to position itself among the world’s leading tourism destinations, with sustained growth in international demand and strong labour market performance.
The Ministry of Industry and Tourism is responsible for tourism policy at central government level. The State Secretariat for Tourism, supported by the General Direction of Tourism Policies (Dirección General de Políticas Turísticas), leads the design, co-ordination and implementation of national tourism strategies, in close collaboration with regional authorities and international partners. The State Secretariat oversees three key public entities:
SEGITTUR, which promotes innovation, digital transformation and smart destination development within the tourism ecosystem.
Turespaña, the national tourism marketing organisation, responsible for international promotion through a network of 33 overseas offices.
Paradores de Turismo de España, a state-owned hotel company operating 99 establishments, many located in heritage sites and protected areas.
Given Spain’s decentralised governance structure, co-ordination mechanisms between the central government, autonomous communities and the private sector play a central role in tourism policy. The Sectoral Tourism Conference (Conferencia Sectorial de Turismo) brings together national and regional authorities to ensure policy coherence and regulatory alignment. The Spanish Tourism Council (CONESTUR) provides a platform for consultation with private sector stakeholders. In addition, the Inter-Ministerial Committee for Tourism facilitates horizontal co-ordination across ministries whose policies affect tourism, including transport, environment and labour. The Turespaña Advisory Council, comprising 11 public and private sector representatives, provides guidance on the strategic direction and implementation of Spain’s international tourism marketing.
Under the 2023 General State Budget, the Ministry of Industry and Tourism was allocated approximately EUR 277.1 million for co-ordination, promotion and support for tourism policy. In the absence of subsequently approved State Budgets, the 2023 allocations have been extended under the budgetary rollover mechanism and therefore constitute the reference baseline for the 2024–26 period. These figures exclude the extraordinary funding channelled through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, which supported substantial tourism-related investments on a temporary basis and is scheduled to conclude in 2026.
Source: OECD, adapted from Ministry of Industry and Tourism, 2026.
Tourism policy in Spain is guided by the Spain Tourism 2030 Strategy, adopted in 2025, following a participatory process launched in 2022 within the Spanish Tourism Council (CONESTUR), involving over 200 regional authorities, social partners, academia and industry representatives. The Strategy is aligned with the UN 2030 Agenda, the EU Transition Pathway for Tourism and the Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism (co-chaired by Spain at the UN level).
The Strategy includes 50 specific measures, structured around the three pillars of sustainability (economic, social and environmental). It aims to create value through sustainable tourism, rather than a volume-driven approach and is built on two foundational principles:
People at the centre: tourists, workers, entrepreneurs, residents and destination builders must all benefit because tourism is fundamentally a human activity interconnected with local communities (residents, workers, entrepreneurs).
Interdependence of economic, social and environmental sustainability: progress requires integrated actions, not parallel siloed agendas. The Strategy is based on a holistic understanding of tourism sustainability, which will enable the development of a truly sustainable tourism policy.
The Strategy defines 15 common goals based around the roles that people play within the tourism sector – destination builders, job creators, workers, residents, tourists – and is structured into five main programmes reflecting these identified roles:
Destinations Programme: aims to strengthen the management capacities of destinations, renew sun and beach, urban, rural, and nature destinations, improve collaborative governance, advance environmental sustainability (focusing on water usage, mobility, carbon footprint), increase resilience to climate risks and strengthen Spain’s international competitiveness. Key actions include climate adaptation in coastal and island destinations, support for rural and inland areas to promote territorial balance and reduction of seasonality.
Business Programme: prioritises support for the 93.8% of tourism companies that are SMEs. Key measures include digital transformation through the ‘Última Milla’ (Last Mile) programme for the digitisation of tourism companies (supporting nearly 500 tourism SMEs), integration of SMEs into digital innovation centres and EU digital programmes and support for internationalisation and innovation in tourism products.
Talent Programme: tourism represents over 13% of national employment and the Strategy identifies workforce sustainability as a structural priority. Key actions include improving working conditions and professionalisation, aligning training with green and digital transitions and promoting risk prevention and crisis resilience. The implementation of the ‘Anfitriones’ national training programme will provide free and flexible learning opportunities for tourism professionals across Spain. Key priorities include sustainability, digitalisation, innovation and service quality.
Residents Programme: the Strategy explicitly addresses resident perceptions and social sustainability. According to the Resident Opinion Survey on Tourism conducted by Turespaña in 2024, 65% of the resident population aged 18 and over have a positive or very positive opinion of the effects of tourism on their place of residence. Key actions include tackling housing pressure, support for regulation of short-term rentals, protection of cultural heritage and “living culture” and reinforcement of governance mechanisms in destinations.
Tourists Programme: actions aim to influence demand patterns and visitor behaviour to promote sustainability values, raise visitor awareness of responsible behaviour, increase tourists’ contribution to environmental sustainability, communicate achievements and good practices related to environmental performance, understand visitor adaptability to climate change and introduce new sustainability standards.
The Strategy will be implemented through a two-tier governance structure including the Spain Tourism 2030 Monitoring Committee, which is chaired by the Secretary of State for Tourism and includes the Directorate General for Tourism Policies, Turespaña, Segittur, and Paradores, and the Inter-Ministerial Committee for Tourism. Built-in monitoring and evaluation mechanisms include biennial action plans, annual monitoring reports, interim and final evaluations and both implementation and impact indicators.
Beyond the Strategy, Spain launched the Smart Destinations Platform in June 2025 (see box below). The aim of the platform is to integrate, collate and combine public and private data to build information on the ecosystems of Spanish tourism destinations, while activating continuous innovation and meeting the needs of tourists, destinations and companies.
Spain launched the Smart Destinations Platform to address a structural capacity gap in destination-level data management. Many small- and medium-sized tourism destinations lacked the financial and technical resources to develop interoperable digital infrastructures, limiting evidence-based decision making and effective management of tourism flows and impacts.
Developed by SEGITTUR and funded through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, the Smart Destinations Platform provides a shared national digital platform to integrate public and private data through a common model that aligns with Spain’s Smart Tourism Destination Standards.
The Platform offers a first layer of content, such as events, points of interest, tourist recommendations or routes curated by the destination, a single common data language and automatic multilingual translation. This solid foundation allows destinations to focus on creating quality content. The Platform supports the entire tourism value chain, from trip preparation to in-destination services and provides destinations with tools for strategic planning, monitoring and control. It also integrates advanced tourism intelligence capabilities, including data generation, descriptive and predictive analytics, and knowledge visualisation, and is aligned with the development of the Spanish Tourism Data Space.
Key challenges for the implementation of the Platform included aligning diverse stakeholders with different levels of digital maturity, the definition of a common system for organising information, ensuring data quality and standardisation, and building trust among public and private actors regarding data sharing. Addressing these issues required strong governance mechanisms, continuous capacity-building efforts and close collaboration with regional and local administrations.
The Platform aims to integrate all Spanish smart tourism destinations, providing a shared digital foundation to reduce individual implementation costs and accelerate digital uptake. Initial results show increased participation of destinations and stakeholders, improved availability of structured tourism data and enhanced analytical capacity at destination level. Technical sandboxes and open innovation services have been deployed to encourage collaboration with start-ups and technology providers.