Lloret de Mar has kicked off the first edition of the Tourism Forum for Coastal Destinations under the slogan “Competitiveness of Sun and Beach”, held at the Guitart Central Park Hotel and organised by the Climent Guitart Foundation, the University of Girona and Lloret de Mar Town Council through its Climent Guitart Chair: Orientation, Innovation and Competitiveness in Coastal Tourism. This Forum aims to bring advanced research closer to the entire tourism sector, both private and public, in order to collaborate closely and formulate solutions to the future challenges facing coastal tourism.
A total of 35 senior academics, 9 universities and 11 chairs from the area of influence of the AMT (Alliance of Sun and Beach Tourism Municipalities), their political representatives, and the management of the tourism promotion bodies of these municipalities took part in the programme today. During the opening ceremony, Anna Garriga, director of the Climent Guitart Chair, explained that “yesterday afternoon they held the first working session, which has already borne fruit with the agreement to set up the Chair Network, which will aim to share knowledge through the research generated by the different Chairs”. One of the main conclusions of the general consensus among the different chairs is that “in the academic sphere it is necessary to position tourism in the preferential place it deserves and it is necessary to give greater public visibility to the studies and research that are carried out, as they often only remain within the sphere of the university world”.
The Mayor of Lloret highlighted this key position of tourism and stressed that “working together and not in parallel as we have traditionally done is the way to achieve common well-being and social, economic and environmental sustainability”.
For the President of the Climent Guitart Foundation, Cristina Cabañas, “it is a great satisfaction that the Climent Guitart Chair has been able to lead this first tourism forum and we are grateful for the involvement of the municipalities of the Alliance of Tourist Municipalities”. Albert Robert remarked that “My objective as Mayor, as I have shared with the citizens of Lloret de Mar, is to achieve maximum consensus on issues of interest to our municipality and, of course, tourism and its future is one of the priorities”.
At the round table on challenges and public policies in tourist municipalities, in which various political representatives from the Alliance of Tourist Municipalities took part, Albert Robert, Mayor of Lloret, discussed the Digital Transformation blog and explained that “Lloret wants to position itself as a benchmark and a gateway to technology and innovation. We are working to have and manage our own digital identity through tools such as web 3.0 and the Blockchain Centre to develop the tourism node in our new Smart Center, which will be 100% technological and will also include a coworking space for small start-ups in this field”. The Mayor of Lloret shared a table with the Mayor of Benidorm, Antonio Pérez, who presented sustainability projects that are being worked on in Benidorm, such as the water footprint that provides information on the water consumption of each service and social sustainability with 60,000 jobs linked to tourism activity. The Councillor for Tourism of Adeje (Tenerife), Adolfo Alonso, spoke about tourism financing. The Councillor for Economic Promotion of Salou, Héctor Màiquez, spoke about the diversification of tourism products in Salou. And finally, Xavier Pascuet, Director of Tourism and Coastline of Calvià, shared the management of its 33 beaches and 54 kilometres of coastline, and the blue economy for the protection of the marine environment.
Elizabeth Keegan, manager of Lloret Turisme, shared the table with the director of the Salou Tourist Board, Marc Espasa; Xavier Pascuet, director of Tourism and Coast of Calvià, and Carmen de Miguel, tourism policy technician at Adeje Town Council (Tenerife). Elizabeth Keegan explained that “tourism promotion has changed completely from many perspectives: in tourist offices we have gone from having a team that exclusively attends visitors in person to having specialised and professionalised technicians in areas such as promotion, marketing and communication; digitalisation has provided us with many opportunities and more economical ones, but it must be taken into account that each channel needs its own tone and content, and tourism promotion bodies are not only dedicated to product diversification, but we even work on micro-segmentation”. He added that “all this change in trend also requires a change of image and at Lloret Turisme we are working on a rethinking of the brand that includes all these new attributes of the destination and aligns them with the trends in demand”.
In the afternoon, this first day of the tourism forum continued with two tables, one on tourism innovation and the other on the competitiveness of coastal destinations, where the different chairs shared their studies and research.
Tourism figures from the Alliance of Sun and Beach Tourism Municipalities (AMT)
Data published by the National Statistics Institute (INE) show that of the 71.6 million tourists (national and international) who chose Spain for their holidays between January and December 2022, a total of 10.7 million chose one of the municipalities of the AMT, which represents 14.95% of visitors and 18.43% of overnight stays in Spain.
