On 5 and 6 October, the Westin Palace Hotel, Madrid, hosted the 2015 Shopping Tourism & Economy Summit.
The 2015 Shopping Tourism & Economy Summit is the first European event devoted exclusively to shopping tourism, recognizing the phenomenon as one of the main drivers of urban economic development in the years to come due to its added value, its capacity to create jobs and bolster tourism activity, and its potential in terms of recovering large investments in infrastructure and technological innovation.
The chief goal of the summit is to stimulate the shopping tourism sector in order to drive business, operating under a shared, global strategy that will benefit cities, the hotel industry, top brands, the commercial sector, gastronomy and large infrastructures (airports, motorways, high-speed transport, etc.), as well as technological firms, via the creation of essential tools associated with information, management and methods of payment.
In the long term, the summit aims to become a shopping tourism forum par excellence and positioning its sponsors, the city of Madrid and “Marca España”, as global leaders in this form of tourism.
