Tourists Wary of Turmoil in the Middle East Are a Boon to Southern Europe

Call it an alternative financial bailout.

As Europe’s peak holiday season draws to a close, Spain and the other countries of Southern Europe hit hardest by the euro debt crisis are reaping the benefits of increased tourism.

Anita Bürgler, a 43-year-old Swiss kite-surfing fanatic, chose this resort town on the Strait of Gibraltar to spend her first-ever Spanish holiday. She heard it has some of the strongest winds in Europe.

In Tarifa, she found the wind-swept coastline that she expected. It might have been just a bit crowded for her taste. The shore is, she said last week, “just very busy, with too many other surfers to really enjoy myself.”

So she and her 45-year-old partner, Urs Baur, who also had never vacationed in Spain, spent much of their two-week holiday enjoying other activities that included whale watching, hiking and a day trip to the picturesque town of Ronda.

But Tarifa has not necessarily seen the last of Ms. Bürgler this year. She said she was almost certain to cancel her annual kite-surfing winter holiday to Egypt’s Red Sea, booked for November, because of security concerns. Instead, she will consider another visit to Tarifa, whose waters will be colder but far less crowded than in August.

Indeed, political turmoil elsewhere around the Mediterranean has benefited Europe’s southern coast. Last week, an association of entrepreneurs in the Canary Islands, the Spanish archipelago off West Africa, forecast that before the end of the year, their region would welcome an additional quarter-million people who had initially planned to escape Europe’s winter cold by vacationing in Egypt but now planned to go elsewhere in response to the military takeover and rioting.

Spain has perhaps been the main tourism beneficiary of the repercussions of events in the Arab world and Turkey, according to travel experts and early estimates. Tourists visiting Spain spent 32 billion euros, about $42 billion, in the first seven months of the year, up 6 percent from 2012 (including spending on transportation), according to data released last Tuesday by Spain’s tourism ministry.

Tourist spending is a small fraction of the $1.3 trillion Spanish economy, but it is a financial bright spot for a country that has not had many in recent years. In the first seven months of 2013, Spain welcomed a record 34 million foreigners, a rise of 4 percent from a year earlier.

British visitors accounted for almost a quarter of the total. But the strongest percentage rises came from tourists from Russia, up more than 30 percent, to 840,000, and the Nordic countries, increasing 18 percent to 2.9 million.

Many analysts now expect the number of foreign tourists visiting Spain in 2013 to breach 60 million for the first time, besting the record of 59.2 million visitors in 2007.

Demand has been strong enough that in some countries, hotels have been able to raise prices. Jürgen Ringbeck, who oversees the transport, tourism and travel practice at the management consulting firm Booz & Company in Germany, said it was striking how far “the Spanish market has been able to capture more demand even by increasing prices.” He said the average cost of a Spanish hotel room had climbed more than 20 percent since 2009, reaching about $70 a night on average this year, which is also above the precrisis level of $67.

“The pricing power of the Spanish market is surprisingly strong,” Mr. Ringbeck said, “which shows that operators have really understood that their major competitors in North Africa are no longer in a position to be very attractive.”

Not all the South European travel markets have pricing power. Greek operators have opted for more aggressive pricing and more package holidays than in the past, said Mr. Ringbeck, who estimated that Greece’s hotel prices were down around 10 percent from last year.

Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.