Record breaking figures for Marbella

5 January 2015

Tourism in Marbella, and to a larger extent, on the Costa del Sol as a whole, closes a year that will be remembered as the one when historic records were broken. More than ten million tourists and eighteen million overnight stays in hotels where registered on the Costa. Nobody really doubts that 2014 has been the year in which Marbella and the rest is of Malaga has put behind it one of the longest lasting crises on record and can look towards a much brighter future and transfer any doubts into solid confidence.

If you had wandered through the streets of Marbella on a busy summer evening, the amount of tourists would have surprised you.

Data from the National Statistics Institute for the first month of the off-season have shown that the Costa del Sol’s numbers don’t shrink too much in winter, even when there is a larger number of rooms to fill, given that this year, 5.400 less rooms have closed during the off season than last year.

There are just sixty hotels with "winter closed" signs hanging up - adding up to 2421 rooms - which is actually a good indication that things are changing for the better. This is the first winter in which the numbers of winter closings have shrunk since the economic crisis started. The hotels staying open have reached better results than last November, with 240 more hotels with more than 84.417 beds. These hotels will benefit from this winter’s Plan Against Seasonality, driven by local community government with 18.3 million euros to invest in hotels until 2016.

Early figures indicate that 2014 will close with almost 5 million tourists staying in hotels, which isn't far off the record broken in 2008. Data from the year up to the month of November showed that the overnight stays’ numbers have grown to 17.3 million, far ahead of the 16.7 million that was reached in the year 2008, which up to now was the best year for tourism in Málaga.

This figure allows predicting that if the number of overnight stays remains the same as last year’s during the month of December, the year’s totals will reach 18 million hotel reservations. It has contributed to the average occupancy for the first eleven months of the year, 58.7 percent to be higher than it was during the historical years before the crisis, as noted by Elias Bendodo, president of the Tourism Board.

It has been a good year for Costa del Sol in every aspect and for the main areas, from the coast to the interior areas. Employers insist that they cannot even be blamed, as they were last year that the great results didn't generate new jobs. Up to November, hotels have employed an average of 11.502 workers, nearly five hundred jobs more than last year. In this respect, the gap is larger when compared to the years before the crisis, but the trend is moving up.