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Tourism7 min read

Spain broke its tourism record in 2025, and half of its small properties still run on paper

96.8 million tourists and €134,712 million in spending, according to INE. Yet 50.6% of small accommodation businesses managed bookings by hand and 72.7% set prices with no tool. What that gap costs and where to start closing it.

Balconies of a coastal hotel among palm trees

Spain closed 2025 with 96.8 million international tourists and 134,712 million euros in spending. Both figures are all-time highs. And yet half of the country's small accommodation businesses were still keeping their bookings in a paper diary.

That gap between the demand arriving and the capacity to handle it is, in our view, the most concrete problem facing small accommodation providers in Spain today. It shows up in the accounts: rooms held back out of caution that never get sold, and prices that reach high season too late.

What the 2025 figures say

On 3 February 2026 Spain's National Statistics Institute published the full-year border tourism figures. They are provisional, with a revision due in March, but the order of magnitude is clear:

Indicator2025Change
International tourists96.8 million+3.2%
Total spending€134,712 million+6.8%

Spending grew at more than twice the rate of arrivals: the 2025 tourist left more money behind than the 2024 one. That distinction carries weight for anyone running a property, because it puts the year's margin in the price per booking ahead of the number of bookings, and price per booking depends on how and where each night is sold.

The source markets barely shifted. The United Kingdom remains first with 19.1 million tourists, up 3.7%. France fell 1% to 12.8 million. Germany rose a modest 0.6%, to 12 million. Between them the three account for almost half the total, with everything that implies: the Spanish season depends heavily on purchasing decisions made in three countries.

By destination, Catalonia received 20.1 million tourists, followed by the Balearic and Canary Islands with 15.7 million each. Andalusia took 14.5 million and the Valencian Community 12.4.

The record is not shared evenly

The trouble with an aggregate figure is that it hides whoever is not part of it. Those 96.8 million do not reach a chain with a revenue manager and a six-room rural guesthouse in the same way, and size explains only part of it. The rest comes down to whether you can sell the last free room on a Tuesday in October.

This is where the data gets uncomfortable. The SEGITTUR survey on digitalisation among small tourism businesses, whose second edition puts the average digitalisation level of Spanish tourism SMEs at 47.6% and accommodation at 44.5%, had a first edition whose breakdown is more revealing than the average. Across 2,500 micro and small tourism businesses:

  • 30.4% had a digitalised property management system (PMS).
  • 50.6% managed the property manually, with a paper diary.
  • 72.7% set prices by hand, based on experience. Only 6.5% used a tool that updated prices across channels.
  • 90% had a website, but only 58.7% allowed booking and payment on it.

It is worth saying where those figures come from and when: a 2022 SEGITTUR survey, collected and tabulated in the report on hotel sector digitalisation by IMANcorp Foundation and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, published in January 2024. Years have passed and the general average has risen. But the distance between "having a website" and "being able to sell through it" does not close on its own, and it is exactly the distance separating a property from its own inventory.

The contrast with the wider sector is striking. Among accommodation businesses with ten or more employees, e-commerce accounts for 46.3% of sales, against 20% for the average Spanish company. Large accommodation sells online better than almost any other part of the Spanish economy. The small-business figures in the previous section describe a different reality.

What happens when inventory is not connected

A property without synchronised inventory loses money through routes that can be named one by one and measured. These are the ones we see most often.

If rooms are loaded by hand into each portal, there is a lag between a booking landing in one channel and availability updating in the rest. That lag is the operational definition of overbooking. The workaround almost everyone applies is defensive: hold back a buffer of rooms that are never put on sale anywhere, to avoid the risk. That buffer is nights that never get sold.

When prices are also set by hand, the property reacts late to demand. It raises the price once it is already full and drops it when there is no time left to sell. 72.7% of tourism SMEs worked this way.

Then there is dependence on intermediaries. The European hotel distribution study by HOTREC, produced with HES-SO Valais across more than 3,000 hotels, puts online travel agencies at 29.6% of overnight stays in Europe, against 19.7% ten years earlier. Direct channels sit at 50.9%. One in five European hotels sells more than half its nights through OTAs.

A note on honesty, because specific Spanish figures circulate that should not be used: the Spanish percentages often quoted in trade press (direct sales falling from 43.6% to 32.1%, OTAs rising from 24% to 35.1%) come from older editions of that same study, with data from between 2013 and 2017. They do not describe the current situation and we are not going to present them as though they did.

What can be said is the direction of travel: online intermediation has been gaining ground in Europe for a decade, and whoever cannot sell properly through their own channel pays that commission with no alternative.

Where to start

This does not require a year-long project. In most of the small properties we work with, the order that works is this:

  1. A PMS that is the single source of truth. As long as real availability lives in a notebook and in one person's head, any later integration inherits that disorder.
  2. A channel manager that syncs both ways. So a booking in any channel deducts the room everywhere else, without anyone having to remember.
  3. A booking engine of your own that actually works. So the guest can pay without leaving the website. It is the only way direct sales can compete with the convenience of an OTA.
  4. And only then, dynamic pricing. Automating a pricing policy nobody has fully understood only makes the mistakes arrive sooner.

The order matters. We have seen more than one property buy a revenue management tool before connecting its inventory, and the result is an expensive tool making decisions on data that does not reflect the hotel.

Where we come from

Creanimund works out of Vélez-Málaga, in a province where tourism and technology live side by side. Andalusia received 14.5 million international tourists in 2025, and Málaga TechPark closed that same year with 719 organisations and 29,018 employees. That proximity is why most of what we do in tourism is integration work: connecting what a property already has to the channels it wants to sell through.

If you run a property and recognise any of the symptoms in this article — the buffer of rooms held back just in case, the price changed by hand on Sundays, the website that shows the hotel but does not sell it — get in touch and we will take a look.

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