Foreign visitors. By place of entry

Visitor

Person that moves for a period of time to a different place to their usual environment, as long as the main motive is not to exercise any paid activity in the place being visited. Includes those that stay for one or more nights (tourists), those coming for a day (excursionists) and those heading for other destinations (passers-by or in transit).

Statistics are drawn up on trips made by foreign tourists in order to quantify and describe flows of visitors to Catalonia.

The data are obtained from the Survey of Tourism Movements at Borders (Frontur) produced by the Institute of Tourism Statistics (ITS). Using the restricted access databases provided by ITS, Idescat expands the results with a greater disaggregation of the variable for Catalonia and provides quarterly information about tourists and overnight stays by country of origin.

Frontur is a continuous monthly survey which uses a mixed data gathering system. It uses administrative registers for all types of transport used, takes a manual count at border points and carries out sample-based surveys at entry and exit points in Spain. This statistical operation generates information about the number of travellers and the number of overnight stays.

The arrival of tourists shows the number of people that make one or more consecutive overnight stays in the same accommodation.

In March 2009, Idescat applied the new methodology for making estimates. The data from 2006, 2007 and 2008 was revised in view of the methodological changes incorporated by Frontur. These changes improved the estimates of data on travellers entering Spain through ports and by road (coaches). The other means of entry (airport, train and light vehicles by road) were unaffected by the changes.

In January 2014 the IET incorporated cruise travellers into the Frontur statistics and expanded the information on train travellers. The coverage of travellers who come to Catalonia was thereby increased.

As for cruises, foreign cruise travellers in transit (in other words, those who, once they reach port, continue on their cruise) are regarded as international travellers. As for trains, the railway flows with France have been redesigned, giving more weight to high-speed train journeys and removing routes which are no longer in operation.

Catalan entry is understood to mean foreign visitors that cross the border, whether by road, rail, airport or port, while non-Catalan entry means foreign visitors entering from the rest of Spain, regardless of how they crossed the border.

Up until the third quarter of 2015, the Spanish Institute of Tourism was in charge of producing the Survey of Tourist Movement on Borders (Frontur) and the Survey of Tourist Expenditure (Egatur). Starting in the last quarter of 2015, the body in charge of said operations is the INE. Said shift of responsibilities also entailed a change in the design and methodology of the surveys, which means the data will not be entirely comparable to previous series.

Until 2015, data are always provisional.