The City Council of Mijas anticipates that a growth of tourists in the city of 74% for this season of 2022 versus the year 2020, so expect exceed the figures achieved in 2019 in the tourism industry, as announced this Friday by the Councilor for Tourism, José Carlos Martín.
This has been highlighted by the mayor in a balance he has made of the activity of the department in the last two years to combat the damage caused by the pandemic, along with the forecasts handled by the area.
Martín recalled that “Covid-19 produced in the province of Malaga a dramatic decline in tourist arrivals, placing the reduction at 71.7%, thus also lowering the direct income of the sector by 7,712.3 million euros”.
In this way, he pointed out that “from the City Council all kinds of initiatives to facilitate the recovery of this industry as soon as possible, already seeing the results on the rise in a staggered manner and with the positive forecast of increasing the growth of tourists in the city by 74%, so the figures for 2019 would increase.
The councilor wantedTake these data with caution. Well, it is not possible to know how the war in Ukraine will evolve or if the coronavirus will resurface with virulence, but if the conditions continue, that is the forecast for the town.
In addition, the council has been done with a ‘golf marketing plan’ prepared by the University of Malaga (UMA), where the impact of the pandemic was already being contemplated; a ‘tourism reactivation plan for Mijas’; a brand to unite the golf courses of the municipality and better promote the destination; a ‘plan for the reactivation of Oriental tourism’; aid for 1.8 million euros from the COMETHA Tourism Plan for hotels and golf courses or the revitalization of the economy by reinventing original events, among others.
As he recalled, in the year 2021 Mijas has grown 69% in searches for ‘eBooking’ (one of the largest and busiest travel and accommodation websites in the world), as well as from the portal ‘clubrural.com’ ranked the municipality as one of the 20 rural destinations of coast preferred by its users in Spain.
In this 2022, Mijas has won the distinction of Capital of rural tourism 2022 of Malaga, according to the same website, which encourages the Consistory to continue working so that the destination “continues to grow and consolidate itself as what it is, one of the most complete places with the most diversified offer in Europe”.
Last February, in a conference given at the Consistory on the use and importance of Big Data, the head of the Tourism Intelligence Area of Costa del Sol Tourism, Rafael Fuentes, highlighted that “Mijas is one of the crown jewels of the province of Malaga and Andalusia, as it is increasingly in demand, being the reference of many emerging markets and with greater spending power” such as the Korean or Japanese market.
Martín has stressed that the Department of Tourism has devoted all its efforts from the beginning to combat the problem that one of the main sources of income was experiencing of the people of Mijas, such as the tourist industry, for which it has developed up to three promotional campaigns since 2020.