Tourism and Covid-19: Figures and Challenges for Spain.

Tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing economic sectors in the world contributing to economic growth and development in many regions and providing income through job creation. Spain, of course, is not an exception. Moreover, mankind has a need to travel in order to explore and discover and to live new experiences that, all together, give a new meaning to life. However, the recent Covid-19 outbreak has plunged both national and, specially, international travel. Countries and regions have taken steps towards the reopening of the sector starting in July 2020 but there is no doubt that we are merged in a global tourism crisis. Policy measures to aid and give relief to this situation are put into place by governments and international and regional institutions. Measures are diverse and have worked with more or less success to improve the situation; all of them are aimed to restart tourism supporting travel and, along with promotion campaigns, to boost both national and international demand. In this paper we analyse the situation of the tourism sector in Spain and, specifically, in the Galician region before March 2020 and we compare results and figures with the situation during the pandemic lockdown. In this sense, we analyse the situation of demand, offer and employment before the pandemic and compare it to the situation lived during the Covid-19 outbreak. This paper describes the situation in Spain and Galicia; it provides a descriptive analysis of data and preliminary insights through in-depth semi-structured interviews with different experts belonging to the tourism sector; it is part of a broader project we are working on. The paper is structured as follows. After an introduction, we describe the situation of the sector before the pandemic lockdown in Galicia. Next, section three makes reference to the methodology. Section four presents some of the consequences of the Covid-19 disruption and, lastly, section five highlights the mayor conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]