The Business Travel & MICE sector experienced 9% growth in 2014.
The Spanish market generated 4,400 million euros in the Business Travel & MICE sector during 2014, which was an increase of 9% over the previous year. 31% of this corresponds to the turnover of companies dedicated to the organization of conferences and 69% to the other segments involved, according to a study conducted by The Ostelea Business School of Tourism & Hospitality.
Cataluña was the autonomous community that contributed the most national participants to business events, with 23.9% (5% more), followed by Madrid, with 21.6% (3.8% more), and Andalusia, with 7.3%.
In terms of international tourism, Spain received more than 4.3 million business tourists last year, 6.6% of the total (65 million). Although this figure represents an increase of 6 % over the previous year, it is 17.1 % lower than in 2008, when 5.2 million arrived in Spain for business reasons.
This segment concentrated 6.8 % of the total expenditure of tourists arriving in Spain in 2014, with 4,273 million euros, a result very similar to that of the previous year. On the other hand, average spending per person contracted by 4.9 %, to 990 euros, due to the reduction in the average stay, from 8.6 days in 2008 to 6.1 in 2014.
For its part, spending by Spaniards on business trips last year accounted for 3.6 % of the European total, with 2.2 billion euros during 2014, compared with more than 23 billion in Germany or 10 billion in France.
According to the study, 7% of international travel by Spaniards was for business purposes, compared with an EU average of 12%. However, the average stay of Spaniards, at 4.44 days (11% more than in 2013), was above the EU average of 3.49 days.
INTERNATIONAL CONGRESSES
By number of international congresses, Spain remained in third place in the world ranking, with 578, up 2.85 %;
Spain was second only to the USA and Germany in terms of number of participants, with 289.
Madrid was the third city with the most international congresses worldwide (200 in 2014) and Barcelona, the fifth (182), surpassed by Paris, which has been altering the first position with Vienna. The French capital also tops the list by number of participants, followed by Barcelona, with 127,469, and Madrid, with 91,452.