Thursday 14th September 2017
CUSTOMISE TOURIST OFFER AND PLACE VALUE ON THE CITY AS AN ELEMENT OF ATTRACTION, CHALLENGES FOR THE SUN AND BEACH LEADING MUNICIPALITIES
The 'I Strategic Conference for Pioneering Tourist Destinations' brings together at the Torremolinos Congress Centre the mayors of eight leading municipalities of the segment on six Spanish coasts, members of the Sun and Beach Tourist Municipalities Alliance
Customise the tourist product and segment the offer allowing the tourists to live their own experience in destination and surprise them. Diversify the offer beyond sun and beach, place value on the city as central entity of attraction and its patrimonial, cultural, ethnographic or landscape assets that grant it a differential point to become a 'singular referential mark'. Plan the urban development with medium and long term vision placing value to the city concept and its interrelationship with the way both the citizen and the tourist want to live it. Working on the quality and excellence of the destination in services and infrastructures over successively beating statistical records in number of tourists and overnight stays. Decidedly advance in the implementation of new technologies and evolve towards the 'smart-city' concept, or recover the 'friendliness' towards tourists.
These are, amongst others, the most immediate challenges that the leading tourist destinations of the 'sun and beach' segment in Spain have to face if they are to reinvent themselves and face with guarantees a globalised and growing in competitiveness market. This was revealed in the first morning sessions of the I Strategic Conference for Pioneering Tourist Destinations, which brings together today at the Torremolinos Congress Centre the mayors of the eight leading cities of the sun and beach tourism in Spain, and 17 experts and multidisciplinary professionals who discuss the formulas to make their tourism model evolve and requalify as destinations.
The mayors of eight leading 'sun and beach' municipalities, representing more than 10 percent of the movement of national and international tourists and totaling around 50 million annual stays: Adeje, Arona (Tenerife) and San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria), Benidorm (Costa Blanca), Calvià (Illes Balears), Lloret de Mar (Costa Brava), Salou (Costa Dorada) and Torremolinos (Costa del Sol) meet in this forum, unprecedented in Spain, to discuss the joint challenges that they want to mark as members of the Alliance of Sun and Beach Tourist Municipalities (AMT), created last March, and that aim to re-qualify, gain in attractiveness, diversify and complement their offer, and evolve towards the model of multiexperienced destinations for the tourist.
Relevant meeting
The mayor of Torremolinos, José Ortiz, promoter of this first conference and host of the forum, referred in his opening speech to this meeting as "a relevant and very important meeting for all those who manage the pioneering tourism municipalities in our country ".
Ortiz has emphasised that, without distinction of geographical location and political sign of municipal governments in which all members of the alliance "share the same challenges and the same needs" and hence the constitution of this forum to make a common analysis of the needs they have as destinations after, in many cases up to 60 years of success, "reinvent" and "innovate" in their common goal of "becoming excellence destinations".
"In a market marked by globalisation and increasing competitiveness we have the challenge of offering added values to the tourist," he said, and in this context has appealed to the regional and national administrations, also present at the opening ceremony, to support with fiancial tools the challenges we must address in order to remain competitive and attractive". "We are cities that throughout the year, especially in summer, we double and even triple our population and we have to dimension our public services to that reality and the standards of quality and demand requested by the tourism sector and the tourist itself", he has claimed, a voice that will also be taken to the European Union for being municipalities, in the case of Torremolinos, where 20 percent of the resident population is from European countries.
The mayor of Calvià, Alfonso Rodríguez Badal, has alluded to the interest and vocation of this Balearic destination for also evolving its tourist model and "continue sharing the national tourist leadership as a source of opportunities for the neighbours" of this municipality.
Future vision
The first presentation of the day has revolved around the 'Tourist Offer and Innovation in Pioneer Destinations'. The executive vice president and CEO of Meliá Hotels International, Gabriel Escarrer, has appealed to the mayors to act with "future vision" in a global context in which "sun and beach is a lot, but now not enough" and in that the consumption habits and the customer's own profile have changed.
At the subsequent roundtable discussion attended by Pedro Hidalgo, international expert in Human Resource Training and Training in the Kempinski Group; Juan Carlos San Juan, CEO of Casual Hoteles; Ian Livesey, head of TUI Destination Services in Spain; and Tatiana Martínez, Secretary of State for Tourism of the Ministry of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda; emphasis was placed on the need for tourist councils to receive additional financial contributions to recondition their cities, plan urban treatments, implement digital intelligence, enhance the human capital of the tourism sector, abound in their formation or customisation of the product and destination as key elements to reconvert destinations.