The Destination Barcelona project came about as a result of two main factors. First, tourism policies over the last 20 years favoured a process of extending tourism across the region with the development of inland areas as tourist destinations in themselves (part of a strategy of territorial rebalancing and socio-economic development). Second, the overwhelming success of the city of Barcelona as a tourist destination. Fewer than 1.7 million tourists were accommodated in the city’s hotels in 1990, which reached 9 million by 2015; overnight stays over the same period leaped from 3.8 million to 19.1 million.
Given this scenario, Destination Barcelona is tackling two main challenges:
- How to regionally decentralise tourism from the city of Barcelona and consider Barcelona as a destination that goes beyond the administrative limits of the city. This should address the signs of overload and the conflicts arising as a consequence of unplanned growth based on limited resources concentrated in certain neighbourhoods.
- How to articulate a competitive tourism offering beyond the city of Barcelona, yet which takes advantage of the values of the Barcelona brand. This entails expanding the geographical and symbolic dimensions of Barcelona and placing value on new attractions, services and facilities outside the city of Barcelona.
The general objective of Destination Barcelona is to take advantage of the current tourism dynamic as an asset for local economic development. The social, economic and environmental impact of the growth of tourism needs to take into account regional balance, the redistribution of the wealth generated, carrying capacity, the creation of jobs and the sustainability of the model itself. The aim is to establish a win-win situation, with the city of Barcelona seeing its tourism offering diversified and increased. The province of Barcelona will then improve its tourist positioning through its association with a consolidated brand that is recognised worldwide.
At an operational level, this translates into two main working areas:
- The institutional collaboration between Barcelona Provincial Council, Barcelona Municipal Council and the Turisme de Barcelona Consortium through collaboration agreements. This would be in the fields of promotion, product creation, tourist information and the creation of tourist intelligence that have facilitated a framework of collaboration to progressively align strategies, promotional actions and destination management.
- The institutional collaboration between Barcelona Provincial Council and local authorities in the province to develop policies to promote and stimulate regional tourism and hence improve the tourism offering and position it in both national and international markets. Given the regional and municipal diversity, this collaboration has been orchestrated through intermunicipal tourist structures (at a county level) and materialised in the form of programme contracts as a strategic management instrument rolled out in four-year phases.
With regard to the results, it should be highlighted that the Destination Barcelona agreement allows the joint development of statistics and surveys on tourist supply and demand (joint annual Statistics and Report), the creation of a joint Observatory on tourism in Barcelona and its counties, joint and complementary promotional actions in the different outgoing markets, the inclusion of county-related products on the Barcelona marketing platform, the Barcelona is Much More web portal (397 841 visits in 2016) and the merger of the two Barcelona Convention Bureau (business tourism).