Spain receives 9million international tourists in first three months of the year

May 12, 2011 – 10:10 am

Spain received 9 million international tourists in the first three months of the year, according to figures drawn up by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade and published by the Frontur opinion poll.

This represents an increase of 2.9% over the same period last year. This increase is nearly ten times higher than the 0.3% registered in the first quarter of 2010. Particularly noticeable, were the increases in tourists from the Netherlands (22.3%), Belgium (20%), Switzerland (14.8%), Scandinavia (11.7%) and Italy (10.9%).

However, the UK remained Spain’s number one market, with 1.8 million tourists (albeit a decrease of 4.8% from 2010), followed by Germany with 1.47 million (3.7% less), and France with 1.2 million (2.7% more than last year).

In March, international tourist arrivals rose 0.6% to 3.5 million passengers, the Ministry said, recalling that last year’s Easter Week (Semana Santa) began in this month.

An increase in tourism usually spells greater interest in property purchase for second and holiday homes. Areas such as Tenerife are seeing a return of interest in the market as a result of such tourism

Source: Kyero

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Spanish government property roadshow to tempt European investors

April 28, 2011 – 8:53 am

Jose Blanco unveils plans for European property roadshow to tempt investors back to Spain and Tenerife

The Spanish government will embark on a Europe-wide roadshow to convince  investors to come back to the nation’s property market, starting off with a press conference on the latest industry developments next week in London.

Minister of Public Works Jose Blanco and Housing Secretary Beatriz Corredor will brief UK property investors and media on the latest legal reforms and pricing activity in the Spanish property market, at a conference to be held at the Spanish Embassy next Wednesday.

They will then follow on with a consumer roadshow which will begin in Britain and continue to the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden and Russia.

“The Road Show will highlight the strengths of our economy, transparency and legal certainty of our planning legislation”, said Blanco in Madrid last week. “It is a good time to carry out this pioneering initiative because the markets that have the potential to invest in second homes are recovering and we must revive the holiday housing market to speed up the digestion of stock.” 

The Spanish property market is already showing small signs of having begun this ‘digestion’, with a 6.8% overall rise in home sales last year – the first positive figure since its real estate bubble burst in 2007.

By Angela | Posted in Economy, General, Holiday, Inspirational, Miscellaneous Articles, Property, Tenerife, Things to Do, Weather | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Spain to avoid EU bailout

April 12, 2011 – 11:05 am

Spain to avoid EU bailout as property sector begins to recover.

After much speculation on the fate of its debt-ridden economy, it looks as though Spain will avoid seeking a large-scale financial bailout from the EU – an expression of confidence in its recovery that bodes well for property investors. 

Despite speculation since last autumn that its debts were unsustainable and there was no other option for the floundering nation but to seek EU rescue, Spain has stood strong whilst both Ireland and Portugal fell victim to debt crises, and now looks to be out of the woods. French finance minister Christine LaGarde, one of the key European authorities at the centre of EU crisis negotations, told the Wall Street Journal that “Spain isn’t a problem”, while German Finance Minister said that as far as the debt crisis in Spain was concerned, “the risk of contagion has lessened.”

Unlike Portugal and Ireland, which saw severe public opposition to national spending cuts and faced difficulty getting them through parliament, Spain has successfully implemented a drastic debt reduction program and has already cut its budget deficit to 9% from 11% in 2009, although unemployment remains high. As a result, borrowing costs for the country remain at a stable level, and investors appear to be renewing their confidence in Spain and returning to the market.

“Investors increasingly have come to differentiate between Ireland,Portugal and Spain”, economist Antonio Garcia Pascual, of Barclays Capital, told the Wall Street Journal. Credit ratings agency Fitch also reported last month that it considers an Ireland-style complete collapse of the banking and property sector to be “an extreme scenario which is not likely to materialize.”

With property sales having reported a positive growth of 5.9% last year for the first time since the market downturn, and new developments having all but ceased, allowing home supply to be soaked up in relation to demand, it looks as though the Spanish economy and real estate industry is beginning its slow road to recovery. Providing it can remain in investors’ good books in the coming months, the future is looking increasingly bright. Certainly if Tenerife’s recovering property market is to be used as an indicator, light has appeared from the end of the tunnel.

By Angela | Posted in Economy, General, Health, Holiday, Inspirational, Miscellaneous Articles, Property, Tenerife, Things to Do, Weather | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Spain works hard to cut deficit

December 22, 2010 – 2:43 pm

Spain works hard to cut deficit

Spain is cutting its deficit faster than Ireland, Portugal or Greece, seeking to reassure investors that the nation deserves cheaper borrowing costs than its peers. Spain’s central government trimmed the deficit by 42 percent in the first nine months, compared with 31 percent in Greece and a widening budget gap in Portugal. The figures were released yesterday as budget talks broke down in Portugal, and Greece said its shortfall was bigger than reported, pushing up the yield premium investors demand to hold sovereign debt of the so-called euro peripherals over comparable German bunds.

Portuguese 10-year bond yields rose 27 basis points to 5.96 percent, the biggest one-day advance in more than a month. Greece’s yield jumped 73 basis points and Ireland added 32. Spain’s yield gained 9 basis points, leaving the spread over bunds near a 10-week low, reached the previous day.

“Investors seem to be differentiating more between markets as Spain has decoupled in a sense,” said Olaf Penninga, who helps oversee 140 billion euros ($193 billion) at Robeco Group in Rotterdam. He said his view has become more “constructive” on Spanish debt. Spain, which was forced in May to deny speculation that it might follow Greece in seeking an international rescue, slashed public sector wages 5 percent, reduced investment spending and increased value-added taxes in a bid to cut the budget deficit in half in two years. The measures are paying off as the yield difference with Germany has fallen by more than 25 percent from a euro-era high of 221 basis points in June, while spreads for Portuguese and Irish securities rose to records last month.

“Generally the budget seems to be on track and that’s a much better sign than in some countries where this data didn’t show an improvement, so in that sense some of the risks have abated,” Penninga said. The spending plan includes the deepest budget reduction in at least 30 years and aims to slash a deficit of 11.1 percent of gross domestic product last year, the euro region’s third largest, to 6 percent next year. That would leave Spain with a shortfall on par with France.

“There’s more conviction that the 6 percent deficit is achievable,” said Antonio Garcia Pascual, chief southern European economist at Barclays Capital in London. “They’re on track and my sense is they’ll end up a little bit better than 9.3 percent this year.” Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who leads a minority government, has already mustered enough support in parliament to pass the plan in an initial vote, cutting deals with two regional parties that should assure his government survives until scheduled elections in 2012. By contrast, Portugal’s opposition broke off talks on the minority government’s fiscal blueprint, jeopardizing its passage in a parliamentary vote set for next week and fueling the drop in its bonds. Portuguese Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said yesterday that failure to pass the budget “will plunge the country into a profound financial crisis with very serious consequences for our economy, in which we’ll see the channels of financing for our economy blocked. ”

Spanish tax revenues rose 13.5 percent in the first nine months as the sales tax increase kicked in, according to the government data published yesterday. Spain’s ability to maintain that revenue growth may be hampered by a jobless rate of almost 21 percent that will lead the economy to contract for a second year in 2010, damping tax collection. So far this year, Spanish long-term bonds returned 2.6 percent, compared with the 10.3 percent decline for Portugal and 6.2 percent drop for Irish securities of 10 years or more, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Of the peripheral countries, only Italy, with a deficit of less than half that of Spain, has performed better. Its bonds gained 6.2 percent.

Spain is among the peripherals most vulnerable to rising borrowing costs. Greece accepted a European Union-led bailout that should finance the country for at least two years. Ireland doesn’t need to issue bonds for the rest of this year and Portugal has met 94 percent of its financing needs, compared with 83 percent for Spain, said Chiara Cremonesi, a fixed-income strategist at UniCredit Bank in London.

“We’re still short Spanish bonds because we see the risk of supply not being taken very well over the next four bond auctions,” said Gianluca Salford, a fixed income strategist at JPMorgan Chase Bank in London. “But if things continue as they’ve been over the past few weeks, Spain will continue to tighten gently in line with Italy.”  While the relative risk of Spain has eased relative to the other peripherals, investors still perceive that there is a greater chance of the country defaulting than the Philippines, Thailand or Morocco. Credit default swaps protecting Spanish government cost 206 basis points yesterday, more than the 130.9 for the Philippines, 122.2 for Morocco and 89.3 for Thailand.  “When you look at the figures in Spain, I think we’ve seen the worst,” said Michael Wenselaers, a portfolio manager at KBC Asset Management in Luxembourg, who’s underweight in  Spain and “waiting for the right moment to step back in.”

Source: Bloomberg

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Weather in Europe poor? Follow the sun to Tenerife!

December 7, 2010 – 12:26 pm

Why freeze in Europe if you can afford a trip to sunny Tenerife?

Heavy snowfalls forced some of Europe’s busiest airports to close and wreaked havoc on roads and railways as an unseasonable cold snap swept the continent, claiming at least 15 lives. Temperatures dropped to as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius in some parts of Germany, while driving rain in Italy triggered the collapse of two Roman walls in Pompeii and flooding in Venice.

Thirteen people died of exposure in central Europe, including eight in Poland. Most were under the influence of alcohol, according to police.

Two people died in England in accidents blamed on the weather, one in a motorcycle crash and the other after falling into a freezing lake.

Albania meanwhile proclaimed a state of natural disaster in the north due to heavy floods, and more than 200 people were evacuated from the region near Shkodra as hundreds of houses filled with water.

Transport chaos hit the whole of the continent as the snow spread, and Britain – shivering in the earliest widespread snowfalls of winter since 1993 – was one of the countries worst affected.

London’s Gatwick Airport, Europe’s eighth busiest passenger air hub, will be shut until at least 0600 GMT on Thursday as staff worked to clear the runways.

A Qantas spokesman said none of their flights had been delayed. He said the airline operates out of London Heathrow Airport and Germany’s Frankfurt Airport, both of which have not closed.

Edinburgh Airport, Scotland’s busiest, was shut and delays were reported at airports in Glasgow and Aberdeen in Scotland, Newcastle in northeast England and Jersey in the Channel Islands.

British forecasters said Wednesday had been the coldest December 1 on record, with no hope of a let-up in the coming days.

British insurer RSA warned that bad weather in the run up to Christmas would have a major impact on the economy and could lead to significant losses for struggling businesses.

“This cold front couldn’t come at a worse time for the UK,” said David Greaves, director of RSA.

“If we lose just one fifth of our daily GDP through companies not being able to open and people cancelling spending plans on events and shopping, we’re looking at about £1.2 billion every working day,” he said.

Oil giant BP said the weather had “severely impacted” its deliveries to more than 100 petrol stations across Scotland and that it would only carry out safe and essential deliveries from its Grangemouth terminal near Edinburgh.

Police in the southern countries of Kent and Surrey advised motorists not to travel unless their journey was absolutely essential, with severe delays reported on the M25 London orbital motorway which passes through the counties.

Britain, which last year shivered through its coldest winter in 30 years, has not seen such widespread early snowfall since 1993.

Heavy snowfall also forced the closure of Geneva International Airport where 100 stranded passengers had to spend the night in the terminal. Two hundred others were sheltered by the civil protection unit as hotels were fully booked.

Switzerland’s Basel Airport shut its runway in order to clear off the 10cms of snow that accumulated in just over two hours. The country’s biggest airport Zurich was still operating, although 70 flights had been cancelled due to bad weather conditions in other airports.

At Germany’s Frankfurt airport, Europe’s third busiest, 153 flights were cancelled, all due to flights not arriving from elsewhere.

And 250 flights were cancelled at Munich airport, nearly a quarter of the daily total, mostly due to snow preventing take-offs.

In the Paris area, French aviation authorities asked airlines to cancel 25 per cent of their flights at Roissy airport and 10 per cent at Orly because of expected snowfalls. But there were no flight cancellations Wednesday

Snow and freezing temperatures however forced authorities to cancel 116 flights from Lyon Airport.

Trains were also hit, including the Eurostar, which operates high-speed passenger trains linking London with Paris and Brussels. Speed restrictions were imposed and led to delays of up to 90 minutes and some cancellations.

There were widespread problems on the roads across Europe, including in France where 17,200 trucks had to abandon their journeys nationwide.

There were serious accidents reported on the main road between Prague and the eastern Czech city of Brno.

In Italy snowfalls disrupted traffic in city centres and on motorways in the northern Lombardy and Piedmont regions, and in Spain school transport services were disrupted by heavy snow in northern and central regions.

Snowdrifts and fallen trees also caused traffic problems in Germany.

Bild newspaper said it was the coldest December 1 in several hundred years, with temperatures as low as minus 18C in some places.

Eight people have died of exposure in Poland, three in the Czech Republic and two in Lithuania, officials said on Wednesday.

In Italy two ancient Roman walls fell down in the archaeological site of Pompeii due to persistent heavy rains that wore away the ancient mortar between the stones.

With all this bad weather, why not  get on a plane to the warmth of Tenerife and the Canarian sun?

By Angela | Posted in Economy, General, Health, Holiday, Inspirational, Miscellaneous Articles, Tenerife, Things to Do | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

British Expats favour British banks

November 25, 2010 – 2:12 pm

British expats favour British banks

British expats believe that British banks are best and many prefer to keep their savings in Sterling, a survey has found.

Their confidence in the British financial system is maintained even after living abroad for many years with 55% of those who have been overseas for over five years still having a UK current account and 80% still holding money in Sterling, the survey from Lloyds TSB International shows.

The survey of British expats, living in France, Hong Kong, Spain, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and the US, also shows that confidence in sterling is high in comparison with other currencies, with four times (44% versus 11%) as many respondents believing that sterling is stronger than the euro for their savings. Only 3% of those now living abroad cite weakness in sterling as a factor most likely to contribute to having to return home early.

‘It is reassuring to see that so many British expats are confident in the future of sterling which, after depreciating over the past few years, has stabilised as the economic recovery has taken hold and measures to improve the public finances have been laid out. In part their behaviour has been a reflection on what has occurred in the wider financial markets with the flight from more indebted economies,’ said Jakob Pfaudler, managing director of Lloyds TSB International.

Gordon Maddock, who has lived in Almeria, Spain since 1995, agrees with the findings of the survey. He decided to move abroad on his retirement and take the opportunity to establish himself as an author, artist and composer. He has since published three books and exhibited art in Germany, Spain, America and the UK.

He holds his savings in sterling and has confidence in its increase over the next six months, whilst believing that sterling remains a strong currency in the Western economy. Maddock also has a current account with BBVA in Spain and has found that bank charges are higher in Spain for all accounts and he would only consider moving his money when conditions demand, rather than for better investment.

For Maddock sterling is also convenient as he has a government pension and has to declare taxation matters in the UK.

By Angela | Posted in Economy, General, Holiday, Inspirational, Miscellaneous Articles, Property, Tenerife, Things to Do | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Adventure tourism on the increase

August 19, 2010 – 2:42 pm
adventure tourism in Tenerife, reaches from the beaches to Mount Teide

Adventure tourism in Tenerife, reaches from the beaches to Mount Teide

Adventure tourism, long considered  for the small group of dare devils, is becoming more mainstream, with tourists more likely to rappel down mountains, cycle or volunteer while on vacation.

These adventurers are young, affluent and spent $US89 billion ($US97 billion) last year, excluding the cost of airfare and gear, according to a study by researchers at George Washington University’s School of Business.

“You have a lot of people who want to roll up their sleeves, get involved in a culture and have a more authentic experience than just laying in the sun,” said Dr. Kristin Lamoureux, an author of the study, which was conducted with the Adventure Travel Trade Association, an industry group.

The researchers questioned 850 travellers from North and South America and Europe. Seventy percent of international travel originates in those regions. Countries with the most travellers are the United States, Argentina, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain.

Although overall tourism figures were down by 6 per cent in 2009, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the study showed that when people travel, they are more likely to engage in physical activities, providing a new revenue base for tour operators.

Based on their findings and data from the UNWTO, the researchers estimate that 150 million adventure trips will be taken next year.

“There is a perception that the adventure tourism market is a very limited group of people who are seeking high-risk activity, but the reality is that it’s a much broader market than we thought … and they are willing to spend,” Lamoureux said.

The typical adventure traveller was 36 years old, spent between $US450 ($A493) and $US800 per vacation, excluding airfare, and owned a passport, according to the researchers.

The biggest source of news for adventure tourists was their local newspaper and information found through Google and Facebook.

Most adventure travellers did not own cutting edge technology like iPhones, a crucial point, Lamoureux said, in helping tour operators maximize their advertising dollars, especially in times of recession.

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Thousands flock to Tenerife on cruise ships

January 31, 2010 – 2:18 pm
Thousands of tourists will be boosting Tenerife's economy again soon.

Thousands of tourists will be boosting Tenerife's economy again soon when the cruise ships start to visit once more.

The cruise ships will be bringing much needed revenue to Tenerife in the next few weeks, consisting mostly of  tourists from Britain,France, Germany and Italy. On February 3rd the MSC Fantasy arrives to kick off the influx arriving in Santa Cruz.

With unemployment rising on the island, this will be a welcome boost for the island’s economy.

By Angela | Posted in Economy, General, Health, Holiday, Inspirational, Miscellaneous Articles, Property, Tenerife, Things to Do, Uncategorized, Weather | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)