Canary Islands receive over 750,000 tourists in September 2012

The Canary Islands received 750,780 foreign tourists during September 2012, bringing the total number of tourists visiting the islands so far this year to 7,370,000 according to a survey carried out by Frontur and released today by the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism. This shows a slight decrease of 0.4% when compared to September 2011, which is due to lower tourist arrivals from the UK. In Spain, during the first nine months of the year, 47 million people visited the country, an increase of 3.8% over the same period in 2011.

Spains main markets are the UK, Germany and France which have all performed well so far this year with increases of +1.1% (to 11.2 million visitors), +5.1% (to 7.5 million visitors) and 7.4% (to 7.4 million visitors) respectively. Russia saw a rise of 40% over the same period of 2011 and for the first time surpassed the barrier of one million tourists. In just two years, arrivals from Russia have doubled as in the period between January and September 2010 there were around half a million Russian tourists arriving in the Canary Islands. The Nordic countries, which are the fourth largest tourist provider for the islands also showed a good performance with almost 3.1 million visitors, up 6.7%, and Switzerland grew by 10% to 1.16 million.

On the other hand, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium saw negative figures of 8.5%, 7.7% and 2% respectively, while Italy and Portugal remained at similar levels to last year. By type of accommodation, hotels increased by 5.9% in September becoming the choice of more than 30 million tourists, compared with a rise of 0.3% of non-hotel accommodation, falling 2.2%. The number of tourists who booked a holiday package increased by 3.7% in September. Nearly 80% of tourists visiting Spain during the first nine months of 2012 travelled by air, a rise of 4.7%, while the road was chosen by 18% of travellers (a rise of 1.9% during September).