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Date Published: 06/12/2023

Golden holiday: Spanish and foreign tourists fill the Costa Blanca

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The Alicante coasts will welcome 1,700,000 visitors over the long weekend

Golden holiday: Spanish and foreign tourists fill the Costa Blanca

The Costa Blanca is preparing for another record-breaking weekend in what has turned out to be a golden year for tourism along the Alicante coasts. More than 1.7 million holidaymakers from at home and abroad are expected to descend on the region between Wednesday December 8 and Sunday December 9 over the Constitution break.

Between now and the end of the weekend, 1,272 flights have been scheduled at Alicante Airport, around 200 more than this time last year, and the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) expects 1.4 million cars to hit the province’s roads. In the meantime, Renfe has put on 14,000 extra train seats to facilitate the additional traffic.

Although hotels across the Costa Blanca are already booked out over Christmas and New Year, the general secretary of Hosbec, Mayte Garcia, is taking a cautious approach and predicting an 85% occupancy rate this weekend.

The hospitality sector is far more optimistic and president of the Alicante Restaurant Association Gabriela Córdoba believes it will be difficult to get a table in many areas.

"It is a very long break and there are both tourists who come to visit us and business lunches and dinners for Christmas. We are going to be packed," she said.

At the moment, everything indicates that more records will be broken at Alicante Airport, with the terminal expecting to welcome more than ten million foreign tourists before the year is out. These figures will easily surpass pre-pandemic 2019, the year that holds the tourist record for the province.

As always, holidaymakers from the UK play a large part, and last month the number of tourists arriving from Britain grew by 6%.

With the Costa Blanca in high demand, the airlines are putting on more flights than ever. Next year, easyJet will open a new base in Alicante and offer ten new routes connecting the province with Southampton, Newcastle, Belfast City, Zurich, Prague, Lyon, Lille, Nantes, Nice and Birmingham With these, easyJet increases its route network from Alicante to more than 20 destinations.

“It is fantastic news to attract British tourism and tourism from all over Europe and it does not occur by chance, it occurs because the company believes in Alicante as a tourist destination and enhances connections,” mayor of Alicante, Luis Barcala, said.

In other news: Which supermarkets are open in Spain over the December long weekend?

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