The head of Portugal’s tourist board has launched a plan to double the country's tourist revenue over the next ten years.
Turismo de Portugal’s boss, Luís Araújo, was at the Lisbon Tourism Fair to launch his Strategy 2027 to the tourism sector from which he expects €26 billion in revenue in 2027. Last year, Portugal recorded tourist revenues of €12.7 billion, so to reach Araújo’s target, an annual growth rate of 7% is needed.
One of the key changes envisaged is the smoothing out of seasonality, long discussed by tourism business owners yet a hard pattern to change. With this in mind, Araújo has only demanded a small shift in off-season income contribution from the current 37.5% of total, to 33.5% in a decade despite referring to seasonality as "the worst enemy of employment" in the sector.
The 2027 plan has an environmental component, with an objective that in ten years time, energy efficiency, water saving and waste management practices at nine out of ten tourism companies will be in place.
"These are ambitious goals but we believe that they are perfectly achievable, with everyone’s work contributing," said Araújo.
The Secretary of State for Tourism, Ana Mendes Godinho, says the new plan is to be integrated into the new 2021 to 2027 community support framework, meaning more free EU money.
The tourism sector already represents 16.7% of Portugal's exports but is dogged by under-capitalised companies, low incomes, bureaucratic barriers, seasonality and a lack of visibility in international markets.
However, the Economy Minister, Manuel Caldeira Cabral, said that "growth is not turning out to be a transitory phenomenon, as some predicted, but a sustainable phenomenon."
Not one of these taxpayer-funded individuals mentioned the single most important threat to Portugal’s tourism industry: the development of Portugal’s sea areas as oil and gas production zones, a scenario denied by the prime minister but enthusiastically endorsed by the environment minister and actively promoted by the minister of the sea.