Rural tourism. Overnight stays. By tourism brands

The Rural Tourism Accommodation Occupancy Survey of INE is one of the statistical sources for measuring tourism activity. Its main purpose is to provide information about the behaviour of a series of variables which make it possible to set out the fundamental features of this type of accommodation in the tourism sector: travellers, overnight stays and occupancy rate.

The survey covers all rural tourism establishments registered as such in the register of the Directorate General for Tourism, which can be consulted in the lists of tourism establishments that the published by the Ministry of Business and Knowledge.

Rural tourism accommodation means establishments or dwellings which provide tourist accommodation in return for payment with or without supplementary services. These establishments usually have some specific features:

• they are located in the countryside in the centres of town with a population of less than 2,000 inhabitants or isolated (outside the town centre);
• they are integrated in buildings that existed before 1950 and that respect the architectural typology;
• they offer a limited number of beds and rooms for the accommodation of guests and meet certain basic facility and amenity requirements

Rural tourism accommodation establishments may use either or both of the following systems for renting rooms:

• complete use rent means hiring the entire building for the exclusive use of the contractor,
• shared use rent means individualised hiring of rooms in the family dwelling.

Traveller means any person who stays for one or more consecutive nights in the same accommodation. The survey classifies travellers by their country of residence, which makes it possible to distinguish between domestic tourism (people resident in Spain) and foreign tourism (people resident outside Spain). In the case of people resident in Spain, information is requested about the autonomous community they are from.

An overnight stay is each night that a traveller stays in the rural tourism establishment.

The occupancy rate per room is the percentage relationship between the daily average of rooms occupied in the month and the total number of rooms in the sample for the same period. We should consider that rural tourism, given its special characteristics, always presents lower degrees of occupancy than that registered by hotels.

On the basis of INE data, Idescat expands on the quarterly results for Catalonia according to the category of the establishments and tourism brands of destination.

Until year 2003, Terres de l'Ebre tourism brand was included in Costa Daurada and Val d'Aran formed part of the Pirineus. At the end 2011, the Catalan Tourism Agency approved the creation of a new tourism brand called Costa Barcelona. This brand includes the territory of the former Costa del Garraf and Costa de Barcelona-Maresme.

In 2015, two changes were made to the tourism brands, approved by the Catalan Tourist Board. The first change is that the counties El Vallès Oriental and El Vallès Occidental, which used to be a part of the Catalunya Central brand, as of 2015 will come under the Costa Barcelona brand. The second change is to the name of the brand: Catalunya Central will now be known as Paisatges de Barcelona.

On the occasion of the creation of El Moianès county, the municipalities of Castellcir, Castellterçol, Granera and Sant Quirze Safaja (which were part of the Costa Barcelona brand), from the first term of 2016 they become part of Paisatges de Barcelona brand.

Thus Catalonia is divided into 9 tourism brands:

• Barcelona: Barcelonès
• Costa Brava: Alt Empordà, Baix Empordà, Gironès, Pla de l'Estany and Selva
• Costa Daurada: Alt Camp, Baix Camp, Baix Penedès, Conca de Barberà, Priorat and Tarragonès
• Costa Barcelona: Alt Penedès, Baix Llobregat, Garraf, Maresme, Vallès Occidental and Vallès Oriental
• Paisatges Barcelona: Anoia, Bages, Moianès and Osona
• Pirineus: Alt Urgell, Alta Ribagorça, Berguedà, Cerdanya, Garrotxa, Pallars Jussà, Pallars Sobirà, Ripollès and Solsonès
• Terres de Lleida: Garrigues, Noguera, Pla d'Urgell, Segarra, Segrià and Urgell
• Terres de l'Ebre: Baix Ebre, Montsià, Ribera d'Ebre and Terra Alta
• Val d'Aran: Aran

Until 2011, the territorial disaggregation by tourism brands was calculated using special estimators for small areas. This methodology does not guarantee that the total amount is exactly the same as the result for the whole of Catalonia using the traditional estimator. However, the discrepancies are of little significance.

Given the limited implantation of this type of tourism in some brands of Catalonia, the year-over-year variation rates can be considerably volatile.