MADRID, 9 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
In the first quarter of the year, Spain exceeded 2.75 million employees linked to tourism activities, which represents a year-on-year increase of 7.7% and 197,630 more employees than in the same quarter of 2023.
In this way, 24.8% of new jobs in Spain have been the result of activities linked to tourism, according to data released this Thursday by Turespaña from the Active Population Survey (EPA).
For their part, active workers in tourism between January and March of this year have exceeded three million – 3,171,827 -, 6.6% more than in the same period of 2023.
The percentage of unemployed over active in tourism activities was 13.2%, a figure lower than that of the same quarter of the previous year and which marks three consecutive quarters of year-on-year declines.
The Minister of Industry and Tourism, Jordi Hereu, has stressed that tourism employment has been experiencing “a paradigm shift” for months, in line with the rest of the tourism sector, given that there are “more employees, more salaried workers, more indefinite contracts and more full days.”
“In short, more and better jobs to care for and reinforce the social sustainability of tourism, one of our fundamental objectives of the present and the future,” he added.
The main tourist activities experienced growth in this first quarter, with increases of 10% for the hospitality industry, due to the positive evolution of both food and beverage services (12.1%) and accommodation services (2.9 %).
Likewise, in passenger transport the year-on-year progress was 14.6%, and only travel agencies were negative (-12.7%).
Furthermore, the main growth in this first quarter was among employees (7.8%), rising to 2,264,942, who also showed increases in passenger transport (14.4%) and in hospitality (11. 3%).
Employees in the tourism sector with a permanent contract (85.3%), one of the variables that mark the improvement in the quality of employment in the sector, have increased by 10.7%, which represents the eleventh consecutive increase.
For their part, employees with temporary contracts have registered a decrease of 6.4%. The temporary employment rate in the tourism sector was 14.7%, a figure lower than that of the same period of the previous year, which was 16.9%.
In this way, the temporary employment rate of the tourism sector is one percentage point below the temporary employment rate of the Spanish economy, which for this quarter stood at 15.7%.
In relation to the type of working day, full-time employees represented 73.8% of the total number of employees and rose by 6.7%. For their part, the self-employed have increased by 7.5% compared to the same period in 2023, reaching 487,743 self-employed workers.
The autonomous communities that have registered the highest number of employed people between January and March were Catalonia, with 537,952 employed people and a year-on-year growth of 25.6%; Madrid, with 444,533 employed, 3.9% more; Andalusia, with 409,233 employed people, 2.3% more, and the Valencian Community, with 276,817 employed people and a rise of 11.2%.
In this period the number of employed people grew in all the autonomous communities, except in the Canary Islands, Castilla y León, Cantabria, Navarra and La Rioja.
On the other hand, the regions where the number of employed people grew the most were Extremadura, with a growth of 32.4% year-on-year; Catalonia, with 25.6%, and Aragon, with 21.8%.
