Paid holidays were, less than a century ago, a gain for the working class, with France as the first country to generalize them in 1936: 15 days for everyone. Since then, and especially after the Second World War, with the consolidation of the European welfare state, much progress has been made in holiday welfare. Only in this way can it be understood that tourism has become a global industry, with Catalonia-Barcelona as a privileged destination. But it is an industry of little added value which, paradoxically, is leaving people not without holidays, but without the possibility of enjoying them at the level of years past. More and more Catalans cannot afford long stays away from home.
Catalan domestic tourism has fallen by 6.8% since 2024 and by 19.1% since the absolute record of 2019. Catalans, overall, do less domestic tourism and travel a little more abroad, but one does not compensate for the other. The total number of trips by Catalans has decreased by 2.4% since 2024 and by 9.3% since 2019.
In low-income municipalities, people go on holiday much less than before. In high-income ones, a little more. The key factor holding back people from leaving is the price of housing: families with less money have to dedicate a large part of their income to it (as do middle-class families, especially if they live in Barcelona). This trend of taking fewer holidays away from home is also influenced by another basic need where price increases have been strongly felt: the higher cost of the shopping basket.
In summary, lower-income households are the ones cutting back most on holidays. And the most affected destinations are those nearby and, among these, precisely the most touristy ones, where prices have risen the most in search of visitors with higher purchasing power, often foreign. For example, Barcelona is one of the destinations where Catalan tourism has fallen the most from 2024 to 2025: by 21.5%, although in the capital international tourism dominates. The Costa Brava, the Costa Daurada, and the Terres de l'Ebre have also seen sharp declines in Catalan visitors, as they depended more on domestic tourism.
The internal Catalan socioeconomic fracture, with a population that increasingly lives at two different speeds, is also noticeable, therefore, in holiday leisure. The same probably happens with cultural leisure or access to higher education. The social elevator is broken and affects all environments. Tourism does not escape this. Of course: between 2019 and 2025, the prices of Catalan tourist services rose by 14.3%, considerably more than inflation. So that all families had to allocate a larger portion of their income to food and housing: however, low-income households dedicated almost 60% of their earnings to this, while the most affluent only invested between 43% and 48%. In parallel, the humblest families had to reduce spending on transport, restaurants, and accommodation more than the rest, which are precisely three of the main items of tourist activity.
