Regional government prepares a new tourist voucher to build on a successful summer
In September, the Viatgem voucher program will start again, from which 180,000 people have already benefited and which has involved an investment of more than 32 million for the sector
Monday 1st August 2022 · Mike Smith
Source: GVA Turisme
The Generalitat Valenciana is preparing a new edition of the Viatgem voucher scheme for September that aims to build on the good data that the tourism sector has been experiencing this summer, as highlighted by the regional secretary of Tourism, Francesc Colomer.
Colomer highlighted that tourist occupation that the Comunidad Valenciana has experienced in recent weeks has shown that the region is facing “the year of consolidation“, with a hotel occupancy forecast for this month of August close to 82%, according to data provided by the Ministry of Tourism.
In addition, he has announced that the Generalitat Valenciana is already working on a new edition of the Viatgem voucher scheme “to influence the stimulation of demand and achieve an annual average of stability and seasonal adjustment” which he described as two of the great objectives for the regional government. “We are facing a month of August that is going to consolidate figures that are already very reasonable”, and, therefore, this is going to be a positive and very dynamic summer,” he explained.
Colomer has detailed that, during the first period of the 2022 edition of the voucher initiative, more than 26,000 reservations have been made and more than 78,000 people have benefited from it, a figure that is intended to increase with greater investment between the months of September to December. Since the beginning of the Viatgem voucher scheme in 2020, there have been more than 62,000 reservations with 180,000 people benefiting and more than 1,000 tourism companies attached to the initiative whilst the Generalitat Valenciana has made an investment in the sector that exceeds 32 million euros.
For this reason, Colomer has highlighted that “in times of difficulty the Generalitat Valenciana has been at the side of the [tourism] sector and the destinations [in the region] and now in the recovery and the strength of our ‘Mediterráneo en Vivo’ initiative is also being demonstrated“.
According to the study carried out by Turisme, the Comunidad Valenciana forecasts an average occupancy for hotels on the coast during the month of August of 81.7%, which represents an increase of 16 points compared to the same month last year. Also the forecasts for campsites, apartments and interior accommodation are “very positive”, all of them higher than the occupation of 2021.
The survey data shows that the hotels on the Castellón coast expect to reach 84.57%, which represents an increase of 11 points compared to August 2021. For the Valencian coast, the initial estimated occupancy forecast is 77.37%, which represents an increase of 21.4 points compared to August 2021. In addition, for the hotels on the coast of Alicante, not including Benidorm, an occupancy of 77.84% is forecast, which is 9.1 points up on August 2021.
In this sense, he stressed that “during these last few months, especially those in which the pandemic kept us closed, both the regional government and the sector have made a great effort, which has now allowed the markets to react and demonstrate their loyalty in our destination“.
At the same time, the regional secretary recalled that, during the most complicated months of the pandemic and the beginning of the recovery, “a great defence of the sector and a very significant investment in online and offline promotion and in marketing focused on keeping alive the memory of the destination in the mind of the tourist, as well as in direct aid that has allowed companies to resist”.
To this, he added that “the capacity to innovate and to keep the quality of our offer intact, which many have even opted to improve, which has led us to a scenario of dynamism, return of the markets and recovery of confidence in the Comunidad Valenciana as a safe, open, diverse destination where the experience is guaranteed”.
Thus, Colomer has emphasized that “the return of the international market this year is very important to understand the tourism model and that loyalty achieved over time has allowed us to recover this demand.” He also wanted to indicate that “this recovery of figures does not exactly translate” into proportional profitability, given that production and energy costs have become more expensive, but even so it is clear that tourism continues to be a very powerful economic engine for the Comunidad Valenciana.
