The Marina Baixa is the area most chosen by the Bono Viaje’s beneficiaries that the Valencian Community is distributing to make tourist reservations within the region. According to information from Turisme, Benidorm is the most chosen city for the first half of 2021. It is followed by Finestrat, Valencia, Altea, Calp, Peñíscola, Benimantell, Xàbia, Alicante and Morella. This initiative has served to encourage travel during the pandemic months since the end of 2020 and has been extended until June in its second phase, which began in January.
As will be recalled, the voucher applies a discount of 70% of the booking, which cannot exceed a discount of 600 euros. For this, the tourist, accommodation, or complementary activities company must be registered in this initiative. In addition, the minimum travel group required by the voucher is two people.
As it was said, Benidorm has been the one that has concentrated more reservations, being the capital of tourism in the Valencian Community and with a great capacity to absorb demand. Precisely, the hoteliers, through the employers’ association Hosbec, have expressed on several occasions the good reception that this voucher has had for them. So much so that they now want to propose to the Spanish government to make one at a national level.
On Wednesday, the Generalitat announced that they had reached number 17,167 on the waiting list so far, which is made up of 37,700 people. They also reported that so far this year, there are a total of 12,071 reservations, which are in addition to the 9,157 that were made in the last quarter of 2020. Turisme’s calculations suggest that this will benefit 36,000 people living in the Valencian Community in this six-month period. The figure corresponds to the general average of three people per travel booking.
According to the data provided by Turisme, most of the bookings are concentrated in the months closest to the summer, from April to June.
As for user preferences, they revealed that the average stay is more than three nights in all types of accommodation. From least to most, hotels have an average stay of more than four nights; in tourist apartments, it exceeds six nights, and in campsites, it soars to 12 nights on average. Similarly, 48.8% of the users of this travel voucher will stay outside the weekend. All in all, the most popular type of accommodation is the hotel, with nearly 78% of all bookings, followed by rural accommodation, which accounts for more than 10% of all bookings. They also stated that there was a “high level of packaging ” of trips, i.e. they also book parallel activities, which expands the benefits of the voucher to other sectors.
