More than 400 private and public agents from the tourism sector participated in the 20 working groups organized by the Galician Tourism Cluster and Tourism Agency as part of the participatory process to prepare the Galician Tourism Strategy 2014-2030. The information collected in these face-to-face meetings is added to the information collected in the nearly 600 online surveys that were received during the process and which sought to accommodate all professionals in the sector who wanted to participate.
The director of Tourism, Xosé Merelles, and the president of the Cluster, Cesáreo Pardal, attended the closing meeting of this process this Tuesday, highlighting the high participation. Cesáreo Pardal highlighted the high percentage of participants from the private sector, both at the face-to-face tables and through the online consultation, and highlighted that “this was a priority objective” and that “thanks to the information collected we will have a current photo of the sector.” , challenges, demands and opportunities to be able to develop the future Tourism Strategy of Galicia until the end of this decade.”
For his part, Xosé Merelles pointed out that this future roadmap will continue “the excellent work carried out in recent years in which in 2023 Galician tourism far exceeded initial expectations.” In this sense, he recalled that the Galicia Safe Destination Strategy launched within the framework of the pandemic and which ends this year “was a very effective tool that allowed us a progressive recovery and strengthening of the sector.”
The objective of this participatory process is to collect information on the diversity of perspectives and challenges that tourism faces in different areas of the community and to prepare a diagnosis of the situation of the sector that will serve as a basis for designing tourism planning for the coming years. With this purpose, the organization of the territorial tables attended to the priority of covering the different existing geodestinations and being able to collect the various realities existing in Galicia in the tourism field.
Administrations and public institutions participated in the process, as well as private business initiatives and associative entities with the aim of bringing their opinion closer to respecting the needs and challenges of the sector. It is necessary to highlight the majority participation of the private sector, which represented 43% in the territorial tables and 67% in the online consultations, followed in both cases by public entities, associations and experts.
Furthermore, in collaboration with the three Galician universities, a scientific analysis will be prepared on the supply, demand and value chain of the tourism sector in Galicia, analyzing at retail the resources that constitute part of its differential offer. This analysis will also address the qualitative and quantitative evolution of the sector in the period 2016-2023.
With this study, Turismo de Galicia and the Tourism Cluster seek to know the current picture of the sector at a time marked by changes in tourist habits, with trends marked by sustainability and digitalization. These issues were addressed in the diagnosis along with three other key aspects: supply, analyzing Galicia’s retail resources that constitute part of its differential offer; the demand, with the aim of knowing its evolution in recent years; and the Galician tourism value chain, delimiting the tourism sector from a business point of view.