The rapid increase in the number of people infected by the virus as of March is having an impact on the confidence and demand from the main markets for Spanish destinations.

In just a matter of days, Spain has become the third most affected country in Europe in terms of COVID-19 infections, with over 2,000 confirmed cases. Despite control measures put in place and reassuring messages from the health authorities and tourism sector in the last week of February, the rapid increase in the number of cases has had a clear impact on confidence and demand indicators since the beginning of March.

Mabrian Technologies, a Travel Intelligence consulting firm specialised in identifying and anticipating tourist dynamics, has prepared a study on the impact of this crisis for Spain as a destination with regards to its four main European markets: United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy.

The study measures the impact from different perspectives, both from tourists and potential tourists’ behaviour as well as with transactional data from the tourism sector, which help to quantify the impact in an objective manner.

Evolution of tourist mentions related to Coronavirus vs evolution of Security Perception.

As opposed to what has been observed in other destinations, such as Italy (see study), the Coronavirus crisis was not showing a clear impact on the tourism sector until the 25th February. The majority of tourist mentions related to the virus appeared on that date. In the following days, there was a small and rapid decline in the number of mentions which then seemed to stabilise, until the beginning of March, when the volume of mentions picked up again.

Taking into account the sentiment captured in these mentions, Mabrian calculates the Security Perception Index towards the destination. This indicator measures the confidence that tourists are showing towards visiting Spain. In this case, the evolution is also different to that observed in Italy.

Despite the fact that the Security Perception Index was affected on the days where high volumes of mentions related to the virus were detected (between the 25th and 27th February), it stabilised and started recovering over the following days, coinciding with the reassuring messages from health authorities and the tourism sector. However, at the beginning of March, and as the situation continued to evolve in Spain, a clear negative effect could be seen in the decline in confidence from visitors and potential visitors.

By studying specific zones in Spain (the most affected zones as well as the major tourist spots), what can be seen is that the impact of the crisis is very unequal in terms of the volume of tourist mentions related to the virus. In terms of the Security Perception Index, when comparing figures at the start of the crisis to figures on the 3rd March, the Basque Country shows the most substantial decline (-11.09%) out of the five destinations analysed. By contrast, the Canary Islands shows a slight improvement over this period.

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