Madrid has surpassed Barcelona as the most competitive city in tourism among the 22 main Spanish urban destinations analyzed in the UrbanTUR 2022 report carried out by the Alliance for Tourism Excellence, Exceltur.
As indicated by this association in a statement, Barcelona has lost the first place it occupied in the two previous years (2013 and 2016). In the last comparison of 2016, Madrid was in second place.
The report highlights that Madrid was a pioneer in its commitment to digital marketing, with the generation of multimedia content for tourism promotion, which places it "at the head of followers on social networks of its tourism promotion profiles, generating an image brand linked to its dynamism, vitality and lifestyle", reports Europa Press.
Reference is also made to the capital's commitment to "excellence and leadership in meeting tourism" through the management team of the Madrid Convention Bureau, driven by a "strong commitment and dynamism of the private sector and a notable investment commitment to the improvement of the product hand in hand with a powerful industry of high-level complementary services, which facilitates this positioning".
As reflected in this classification of tourist cities -which reveals and compares in each case the best local policies applied to tourism and orders the cities according to 64 indicators- Madrid and Barcelona are followed by Valencia, with third place, and San Sebastián, with fourth , reports Efe.
Seville (5th) and Palma de Mallorca (6th) have improved one position compared to six years ago, and Malaga, on the other hand, (7th) has lost two.
The following cities in the ranking are Bilbao, Santiago de Compostela, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Valladolid, Gijón, Zaragoza, Santander, Granada, Salamanca, La Coruña, Alicante, Murcia, Burgos and León.
Of these cities, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Valladolid and Córdoba have advanced one position compared to the previous year, and A Coruña is the only one that has risen two positions.
As Exceltur clarifies in a statement, "the ones that occupy the top positions are not necessarily synonymous with optimal management and, on the contrary, those that occupy the last positions are associated with poor management, since it is the middle level among them that mark the different scales in the positions".
The mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, advanced this Tuesday after attending the presentation of the report that the next Governing Board of the city this Thursday will approve the Local Tourism Council. It seeks, he specified, "to improve co-governance and dialogue with the private sector."
For the mayor, it is "good news" that Madrid is the first city in terms of urban tourism, "because Barcelona had usually surpassed it."
He considers that "the key is to have its own tourism model that is based on the search for excellence, quality and competitiveness as a destination." "We have a great city with a great quality of life with very good public space and numerous attractions and we have focused our efforts on long-haul tourism," she prescribed.
Tourism will launch this year an extraordinary call for a value of 208 million euros for the conservation of assets of cultural interest in urban destinations, said the Secretary of State for Tourism, Rosana Morillo.
Morillo has defended the search for balance in the coexistence between tourists and residents, a bet that has been the axis of the conference held in Madrid within the framework of the presentation of the Urbantur report of the Exceltur alliance.
The report calls for determined public action to prevent the "gentrification" of the centers of some of the most touristic cities.
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