Visitor numbers to Spain’s Balearic Islands plummet over first half of year

THE number of tourists to the Balearic Islands plummeted over the first half of the year.
Figures released this week by the national and regional institutes of statistics reveal that for every 10 visitors Mallorca, Ibiza, Menorca and Fomentera received in the first six months of 2019, there was only one between the beginning of this year and the end of June.
There were just short of 790,000 visitors over the six months, of which nearly 440,000 were foreigners.
This compares with more than 5.5 million international visitors over the same period of last year, and represents a massive fall of more than 92 per cent.
National arrivals on the islands dropped by just under 70 per cent from approximately 1,158,000 to just less than 354,000.
In June, the same month the Balearic government and the hotel sector ran a pilot tourism project to bring German tourists into the islands via safe air corridors, the archipelago registered nearly 28,400 foreign visitors. In the same month of 2019 the figure was in excess of two million.
National visitors to the islands in June this year added up to almost 30,000, more than 91 per cent few than last year.