Cristina Hodgson
MALAGA city has set its sights on tripling its high-end tourism offerings within the next four years.
The capital of the Costa del Sol currently boasts a hotel industry with approximately 15,000 rooms, of which nearly a thousand belong to five-star hotels, as reported by the Malaga City Council’s Tourism Department
However, there are only four such high-end establishments in the city: the Vincci Posada del Patio, the Only You, the Gran Hotel Miramar, and the Soho Boutique Castillo de Santa Catalina.
According to Jacobo Florido, the Tourism Councillor, this limited number is insufficient to attract high-net-worth tourists.
To address this, the city has set a goal of doubling its five-star hotel room count within four years, aiming to reach a total of 2,000 beds.
But the ambitions of the Tourism Department extend even further; they aspire to have the city ultimately offer 3,000 five-star hotel rooms.
Florido emphasises the city’s need for high-end hotels to compete in lucrative high-net-worth tourist markets, particularly in Asia and the Americas.
Currently, these tourists often opt for other destinations on the Costa del Sol, like Marbella, due to the limited availability of luxury accommodations in the capital.
Analysing the summer tourism stay data based on hotel categories, five-star hotels dominated with a substantial 92.1% contribution to the statistics, while four-star hotels followed closely at 89%. As for the average room rates during the summer, they stood at €267 and €163, respectively.
In this context, Mayor Francisco de la Torre has stressed the significance of favouring ‘quality over quantity’ for tourists coming to the city, which aligns with his long-standing position on the matter.
This is particularly relevant in light of concerns about overcrowding and coexistence issues, primarily concentrated in the historic downtown but now spreading to other neighbourhoods like Teatinos, Huelin, or El Palo.
According to the Hotel Occupancy Survey conducted by the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the average stay in June and July amounted to 2.26 days, involving a total of 269,398 travellers who generated 610,131 overnight stays.
In short, Malaga has wrapped up June, July, and August of this year with higher hotel occupancy rates than those recorded during the same months in 2022 and the summer before the pandemic in 2019, with luxury tourism on the rise.
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