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Tourism expenditure from the United States in Spain has shown a marked slowdown since late 2024. This deceleration partly reflects the normalization of tourism growth after the pandemic, as well as macroeconomic factors such as the appreciation of the euro against the dollar and deteriorating growth prospects for the US economy. However, since these factors operate with a time lag, it is likely that the current slowdown also stems from rising uncertainty surrounding US economic and trade policies impacting Americans' propensity to travel to Spain. Considering that in 2024, US tourists accounted for 4.6% of total arrivals and 7.1% of international tourist spending in Spain, this slowdown could potentially subtract up to 1 percentage point from growth of tourism GDP in 2025. Certain regions, particularly non-coastal urban areas, could experience greater impacts due to their higher dependency on American tourist expenditure. Thus far, the sharpest slowdown has been observed in rural areas, where the share of American tourists is comparatively smaller.

House prices have risen sharply since the middle of last year but the trend is very uneven across different municipalities and regions. One factor contributing to this geographical heterogeneity is the recovery in foreign demand: house prices in the most tourist-oriented municipalities are growing more vigorously than in non-tourist areas. CaixaBank Research’s house price forecast models, based on big data and machine learning techniques, point to a moderate slowdown in house prices over the coming quarters.

The pandemic has inevitably brought about major changes in our consumption habits. Faced with the impossibility of going to a store in person, online shopping channels have gained a lot of share in 2020. According to an analysis of CaixaBank’s internal data, this growth has not only been significant but also widespread among companies of different sizes and sectors, and has encouraged many of them to use e-commerce as a sales channel for the very first time.

COVID-19 is having a huge impact on economic activity in Spain and, in particular, on the tourism industry. At CaixaBank Research we expect GDP to fall by between 13% and 15% in 2020, not returning to its pre-crisis levels until 2023. The outlook in 2020 is even grimmer for Spain's tourism industry as it is one of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic.

Activity in the real estate market is recovering from the extraordinary slump experienced during the strictest months of lockdown. House sales picked up notably in the first few months of 2021 while new building permits continue to recover gradually. On the other hand, house prices have accentuated their downward trend observed since mid-2018. Nevertheless, their performance was surprisingly resilient during the pandemic, particularly the prices for new builds, and we expect house prices to continue posting moderate but steady gains in the coming quarters.

The full recovery of international tourism spending in Spain hides major changes in the structure of demand by region of origin. Using data on payments made with foreign cards on CaixaBank POS terminals, duly aggregated and anonymised, we see that Western Europe remains the main issuer of tourists, and that North America and Latin America significantly increased their share of foreign spending. In contrast, the recovery of tourism from the Middle East and Asia and Oceania has been more disparate, affected by geopolitical and economic factors. Overall, a stable but robust growth outlook for 2024-2025 indicates that international tourism in Spain will remain in good shape.

Este documento de trabajo presenta un nuevo modelo macroeconómico de CaixaBank Research para la economía de la eurozona, con el objetivo de que se convierta en una herramienta más para elaborar previsiones a medio plazo y realizar escenarios de riesgo.

Using anonymised and aggregated data from card payments made via CaixaBank point of sale terminals, we analysed whether there were any changes in tourist spending and found that the hottest areas of the country experienced slower growth in tourist expenditure between the high seasons of 2019 and 2023. We also found changes as well as changes in the pattern of expenditure during heat waves. 

The strong growth of the tourism sector in recent years, together with new consumer habits following the pandemic, has led to an extraordinary recovery of the Spanish restaurant sector, both in terms of job creation and turnover. It has also gained considerable international recognition and prestige, while at the same time playing a fundamental role in our country as a promoter of social and territorial cohesion.