Add and continue for the tourism sector. The return of visitors to Spain, like the extraordinary rebound in activity as the memory of the pandemic has receded, were realities known for a long time. But it remained to be seen how this translated into the macroeconomic reality of the country. And this Thursday the National Institute of Statistics (INE) has shown that this activity represented almost 12% of total employment in 2023 and that it exceeded that percentage in contribution to GDP. In other words, the gap opened by Covid was definitively closed and the sector returned to the point it was before the confinements and mobility restrictions arrived that turned everything upside down.
Foreign tourism in Spain experienced a virtuous cycle that started in 2012 and reached its peak in 2019, after seven years of consecutive growth. In that period, it went from receiving 57.7 million travelers in 2012, which represented an average annual increase of 3.7 million visitors. All of this boosted the contribution of the different tourist activities to the GDP in Spain until it reached its peak in that same year, with a contribution of 154,487 million euros, 12.4% of the total GDP, and a contribution of 2.72 million jobs. from work to employment, 12.9% of the total. The pandemic and its devastating effects on tourism sank these indicators by half in 2020, with less than 65,000 million euros and 2.2 million, and it took another three years to recover previous levels.
This can be seen in the latest update of the Tourism Satellite Account, which revises upwards the data corresponding to the triennium between 2021 and 2023 as a result of the adaptation of the national accounts for those three years. The statistics show an increase in nominal GDP of 13,184 million euros. In this way, the revised contribution of tourism to the Spanish economy was 184,002 million euros in 2023, this represented 12.3% of GDP, 0.9 points more than in 2022. Regarding the contribution to employment, this is estimated at 2.56 million jobs, 11.6% of total employment.
In the recomposition of the weight of tourism in the Spanish economy, the exponential increase in foreign tourism has played a leading role, which closed 2023 with 85.7 million arrivals and that at the end of this year, according to the first official estimates. In the three years after the collapse, the number of trips made by these tourists grew by 173%, while the number of overnight stays increased by 142% and was close to 615 million overnight stays. The strong advance, however, was not enough to surpass the stays recorded in tourist accommodation by residents in Spain, which increased by 15% in the same period to a total of 643 million overnight stays.
The updated data shows a completely different spending pattern between foreign and national tourists, although it converges on accommodation as the most expensive item. The Tourism Satellite Account shows that sleeping in a room, whether in a hotel, housing for tourist use or apartment, represents 26.8% of the expenditure that a foreign tourist has to make, far from the 17% that it represents. the service of drinks and meals or the 13.6% that represents air transport.
In the case of national tourists, the most expensive item is also accommodation, with 34.3% of the total budget, closely followed by food and beverage service, with 33.2%. In the latter case, air transport is replaced by spending on travel agencies, which amounts to 10% of the budget. up to a historical average of 163 euros per room per night between January and October 2024 compared to 115 euros in 2019.
