The show concluded with a 7% increase in foreign visitors, thanks to the strong presence of trade professionals from Latin America and Africa, as well as from Spain’s chief feeder markets, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China.
Held from 30 January-3 February 2013 at Feria de Madrid, the past edition of FITUR – the International Tourism Trade Fair – registered favourable attendance figures, thus confirming the show’s status as a key tourist industry event, with more than 200,000 visitors. The number of trade professionals increased by 1.3% with respect to the previous edition, totalling 116,000 in all. Furthermore, the number of oversees trade professionals visiting the show increased by up to 7%.
The exhibitors at FITUR 2013 were able to reach their established goals thanks to the climate of confidence and optimism that currently exists throughout the tourism industry, which reached the one billion tourist mark in 2012, as the Secretary General of the World Tourism Organisation, Taleb Rifai, stressed during his welcome address at the trade fair.
FITUR was attended by 8,979 companies from 167 countries and regions, encompassing all kinds of tourism activities.
World trending topic on opening day
The social media also played a prominent role throughout FITUR 2013, facilitating communication between the show’s different stakeholders: professionals, exhibitors, members of the public, and the media.
On the opening day, FITUR was a world trending topic, and a national one over the following six days. On Twitter alone there were more than 40,000 tweets about the show, representing an average of 8,000 tweets a day. More than 2,000 new fans registered in FITUR’s Facebook profile, bringing the grand total to 57,720. The companies participating in the last edition of the show totalled 93.5 million Facebook fans – a 243% increase with respect to the previous year – and around 14.8 million followers on Twitter, representing a 219% increase. So, the global impact of these two social networks was in the region of 108 million followers and fans.
Social media interaction was complemented by the 2nd edition of the Social Media Sharing Event, organized by agency HEY AV, which on this occasion was attended by marketing and communication professionals from the tourist industry. During the course of this event, some 140,548 users were registered on Twitter alone, sharing 331,000 tweets.
Invited to participate in the Travel Bloggers Meeting, an initiative organised by the show in collaboration with Interface Tourism Bloggers, the blogger community also played a prominent role at the past edition of FITUR. Furthermore, in order to promote closer links with Latin American travel industry opinion-leaders, the Best Latin American Blogger Competition was organised, as a way of acknowledging the increasingly important role that bloggers play in promoting the tourism industry.
In addition to the social media, the show received extensive media coverage, with the attendance of over 7,100 journalists from 60 countries.
Following the favourable results of this year’s event, the organizers of FITUR are already preparing the show’s 34th edition, scheduled to be held from 29 January-2 February 2014.
