Sports tourism, any trips motivated by sports practices, has recently become Spain’s third travel motivation. Hoteliers target sports tourism, especially cycling tourism, in order to reduce seasonality. Spain is working to become one of the leading cyclist destinations in the world.  

Sports tourism includes all types of trips motivated by the practice of sport activities with a competitive or leasure purpose or simply as a spectator. Spanish hoteliers are increasingly relying on this type of tourism to reduce seasonality.

During the past years, trips made by international tourists for sport reasons have increased considerably, becoming Spain’s 3rd travel motivation, having registered more than 2,4 millions international tourists according to the latest data published by Frontur in 2014.  This boom is due, among other reasons, to the increase of the practice of outdoor sport activities such as cycling, golf, running, triathlon or more extreme sports such as trails, ultra trails and ironman.

The clearest example that we can find of this trend is ciclo tourism in europe, which has registered more than 20 million trips per year motivated by this sport. These trips include at least one overnight stay at a hotel establishment. (Source: European Ciclists’ Federation, 2014).

On the other hand, Spain has many key success factors to become one of the main cyclist destinations in the world, for example:

• Climate in a major factor and its natural attractiveness.
• Proximity and security due to good airline connections with top european cities.
• Extraordinary sanitary service infrastructures
• Ideal topography that includes great plains, smooth hills, steep slopes, curves, long straight lines, etc.
• Diverse and extensive network of secondary roads.

These key success factors do not uniquely apply to ciclo tourism, they can also be applied to other sports as football, which many international teams from northern Europe choose Spain to perform stages during the winter breaks.

At the hotel factory we have a wide experience in conducting segmentation projects, analysis of segments and market niches in the destination that can be relevant for a hotel, analyzing all variables such as demand, supply, prices and occupation, as well as the identification of the most valued attributes for each segment.