Imserso to offer 900,000 places to pensioners in Spain for next season

900,000 places will be offered to pensioners in Spain for next season’s Imserso trips.

The Imserso is taking the final steps to close the design of the new offer of subsidised trips for seniors next season. As always, it will allow its beneficiaries to travel to destinations around Spain between October 2023 and June 2024.

What has already been decided is that the 2023-24 plan will offer 900,000 places, which means that there will be 70,000 more beneficiaries than last year. The program will be returned to pre-pandemic figures, close to the historical record for the number of displacements.

According to government sources, no decision has been made yet on the variation in the rates that will be charged to the almost four million Spaniards who meet the conditions to aspire to travel with Imserso.

It has already been decided though that the final price increase will be less than the 8.5 per cent on average to which pensions in Spain have been updated this year. This rate of increase has the agreement of the State Council for the Elderly, they clarified.

With families squeezed onto a tighter budget by the economic climate, the Ministry of Social Rights kept the rates of their trips frozen last year to facilitate access for the elderly. This price freeze sparked angry complaints from the hospitality industry.

The department headed by Ione Belarra plans to ask the Council of Ministers soon to authorise the tender for next year’s travel offer so that tourism companies can begin to make their offers.

This latest travel program is based on a new contract and will have a 14 per cent increase in its value, which will increase the budget to be paid between beneficiaries and Imserso to €300 million. According to the same official sources, the Imserso has held working meetings with the tourism and hotel sector: “to learn about their proposals and endorse the suitability of this new tender”.

According to the ministry, the new contract will improve the quality of trips and stays and significantly increase the potential destinations and the diversity of the packages. There will be an expansion of the modalities of domestic tourism, nature, and cultural circuits.

Without abandoning the traditional and highly demanded coastal destinations, some of the most striking improvements are the incorporation of all the Spanish provinces and their respective capitals into the list of destinations.

This means adding 34 provinces to the current offer, bringing the total up to 52, with ten new cultural circuits and nineteen new nature routes. For those who request it, the revamped program will also increase the number of places with a room for individual use, and will facilitate the enrollment process in the program.

Nine out of ten users rate the tourism plan for the elderly as good or very good, something that is reflected in the fact that two out of three users repeat their participation in the official travel program the following year, according to the latest user satisfaction study by ‘Impressed’, as reported by lasprovincias.es.

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