Barcelona Strategic Tourism Plan for 2020

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Barcelona is one of Europe's main tourist destinations. Tourism has a direct impact on the city’s everyday and economic activity and needs to be integrated as yet another element in the city's management.

The Strategic Tourism Plan for 2020 sets out the road map for Barcelona’s tourist policies over the coming years, based on a participatory diagnosis. Its goal is to ensure the destination's sustainability, reconciling to the utmost all the elements at play and promoting the highest possible social return on tourist activities, where visitors’ expectations are met without any risk to the continued residence of those living in the city.

The initiatives that need to be carried out have been divided up into ten programmes that are summarised below.

OVER

30 MILLIONVISITORS/YEAR 8.7

IS THE SCORETHAT TOURISTS GIVE BARCELONA

37%OF TOURISTS USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT

17%GROWTH INTOURIST DEMAND(LAST 5 YEARS)

46%OF TOURISTSGET ABOUT ON FOOT

92.3%OF THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF VISITORS IS GENERATED BY AIR TRAVEL

Barcelona is one of Europe's main tourist destinations. Tourism has a direct impact on the city’s everyday and economic activity and needs to be integrated as yet another element in the city's management.

The Strategic Tourism Plan for 2020 sets out the road map for Barcelona’s tourist policies over the coming years, based on a participatory diagnosis. Its goal is to ensure the destination's sustainability, reconciling to the utmost all the elements at play and promoting the highest possible social return on tourist activities, where visitors’ expectations are met without any risk to the continued residence of those living in the city.

The initiatives that need to be carried out have been divided up into ten programmes that are summarised below.

GOVERNANCE

1WE HAVE A PLAN FOR GOVERNING TOURISM COLLECTIVELY

Barcelona receives over 30 million visitors every year, a reality that means moving from a promotional strategy to another that opts for a comprehensive management of tourism, publicly-led and ensuring that tourist policies respond to the general interests of the city.

Tourism requires a cross-cutting approach and a diverse range of tools, projects and players involved; coordinating and involving them are key to guaranteeing that the goals proposed under the Strategic Tourism Plan for 2020 can be achieved.

Given the global challenges that tourism raises, we in Barcelona wish to strengthen our ties with other cities and destinations, to share experiences and embark on collective projects that enable us to tackle these challenges.

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KNOWLEDGE

2WE HAVE A PLAN FOR GENERATING AND DISSEMINATING KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge in the field of urban tourism is essential for managing and taking decisions. We in Barcelona are only too aware of its importance. Considerable e�ort has been made to generate and publish a diverse range of information on tourist activities and studies have been conducted analysing economic impact, tourist profiles and public perceptions of tourism, among other things.

This knowledge needs broadening on issues such as environmental costs and quality of jobs in the sector, and the public has to be provided with better information on tourism. The Tourism Observatory will be coordinating and spearheading this research.

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DESTINATION BARCELONA

3WE HAVE A PLAN FOR PROMOTING THE DESTINATION’S SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability is a crucial element for destination Barcelona, a goal that also aims to guarantee the competitiveness of tourist activities, to avoid jeopardising the destination's future, to improve the quality of urban life and to manage the impact of tourist activity, ensuring social return and the territory’s development.

The Strategic Plan understands sustainability from a broad perspective: social, economic and environmental, setting out a dynamic, welcoming, innovative and desirable destination on a metropolitan scale. Promotion tools, conceived as another management element, have to respond to these goals.

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MOBILITY

4WE HAVE A PLAN FOR MANAGING TOURIST MOBILITY

Tourist uses of mobility, along with tourist accommodation and attractions, are one of the key aspects we propose to tackle.

We need to know our visitors’ reasons for staying here, their journeys’ seasonal variations and duration, the means of transport they use and their most frequent itineraries, so we can rethink, manage and regulate the specific practices of tourist mobility. The plan aims to put special emphasis on knowledge and managing mobility in crowded spaces such as Sagrada Família and Park Güell.

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ACCOMMODATION

5WE HAVE A PLAN TO ENSURE RESPONSIBLE TOURIST ACCOMMODATION

Barcelona has recorded a sharp increase in tourist accommodation o�ers over the last few years and the sudden appearance of new types, raising new challenges for planning. The plan provides for the launching of strategies that ensure tourist accommodation has a better relationship with its environment, promote its social and environmental responsibility and highlight good practices.

Approved under the framework of this strategy, the Special Urban Development Plan for Tourist Accommodation (PEUAT) continues to ensure social and economic balance in areas with greater tourist pressure while putting the priority on maintaining and attracting the resident population and preventing tourist accommodation from replacing the residential use of properties.

It also provides for active policies for fighting illegality, in collaboration with websites o�ering tourist accommodation, as well as the creation of a mediation service to help local residents and tourists staying in local accommodation live side by side. P

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MANAGING SPACES

6WE HAVE A PLAN FOR ENSURING AN URBAN BALANCE

Tourist activities make intensive use of certain places and neighbourhoods in the city and this has to be reconciled with the city’s ongoing, everyday life.

These areas will see the implementation of a series of measures and tools agreed to between all the public and private players, who will intervene to reduce the pressure created by large numbers of visitors and maintain the local commercial network. Policies will be implemented to counteract pressure on the property market.

We will be generating a new stable management model for crowded spaces which applies improvements agreed to between the various parties and creates wealth that is fairly and sustainably distributed.

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ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

7WE HAVE A PLAN FOR REDISTRIBUTING THE BENEFITS OF TOURISM

Ensuring the redistribution of the wealth brought by tourism for the entire population is one of the goals of the Strategic Plan. If we are to achieve that we need to take advantage of the developmental potential of tourism as a lever for launching other economic sectors, helping to strengthen the territory’s production network and integrating tourist activities into local economic development.

Initiatives are also needed for ensuring quality, inclusive, innovative and competitive jobs in the tourist sector, such as promoting establishments that create stable work conditions or launching initiatives for training and providing qualifications for the professionals providing services to the tourist industry.

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COMMUNICATION AND WELCOME

8WE HAVE A PLAN TO MAKE COMMUNICATION A KEY TOURISM-MANAGEMENT TOOL

Tourists coming to Barcelona do so largely because of the way we show them the city and its attractions. Having a good communication strategy is essential if we are to make tourism a sustainable and responsible activity that involves residents and visitors alike.

We need to expand our narratives on destination Barcelona, making them more diverse and dynamic in order to open up the range of possibilities for visitors beyond the city's crowd-pulling icons. We also need to coordinate the city’s tourist-communication tools, so that they respond to the goal of ensuring a sustainable destination.

The plan aims to have an impact on the information tourists receive before their stay in the city and to strengthen exchange channels before, during and after their stay.

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TAXES AND FUNDING

9WE HAVE A PLAN FOR COMPENSATING THE IMPACT THAT TOURISM HAS

What does tourism cost Barcelona? What economic benefits does it entail? The balance between costs and benefits has to be calculated and analysed if we are to know what expense tourism represents out of the municipal co�ers and what activities create more or less income and expenditure.

The plan provides for designing a tourist-tax investment and funding plan, exploring other tax measures as management tools and taxing activities that cause more externalities and which a�ect daily life in the city: intense use of public space, property pressure, environmental impact, among other things. In short, this is about having more planning tools at our disposal that also ensure a fairer redistribution.

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REGULATION AND PLANNING

10WE HAVE A PLAN FOR THE REGULATIONS TO SAFEGUARD THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

The plan strengthens resources for inspecting and pursuing illegality, especially in the realm of accommodation, and provides for reviewing urban-planning tools to tackle the e�ects of tourist activities on the city, from metropolitan to neighbourhood scales.

The last few years have seen the rise of completely new phenomena linked to the city’s tourists uses, which current byelaws do not cover. That is why they need to be changed and new ones established where needed, such as economic activities in spaces with greater volumes of visitors or unregulated o�ers of accommodation.

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See the full Strategic Tourism Plan 2020:

http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/turisme/en/strategic-plan