A tourist period par excellence, the “Moroccan” summer looks promising. The summer season will be full this year, reinforcing the influence of Moroccan tourism on a large scale.
Activity is on an upward trend and will be consolidated from the end of Ramadan. Many MREs have chosen to bring forward their summer vacation to spend Aid Al Fitr with family. Likewise, the destination Morocco will begin to welcome its first foreign summer tourists from the first weeks of June. A keen clientele, particularly seaside resorts and festive summer evenings in Morocco. Marrakech of laughter, sacred music of Fez, Mawazine, Gnaouas and World Music…. All these festivals and others will set the pace this summer, giving each destination in the Kingdom its own “tourist” identity.
On the eve of the tourist rush, promotional operations for the Morocco destination are particularly focused on digital. If the Moroccan National Tourism Office lists Morocco’s tourism assets, the tourism observatory targets, for its part, directly the Kingdom’s source markets. New market sheets are posted online on the Observatory’s digital platform. An action to reconquer potential tourist areas which will further strengthen the flow of tourists from these regions. The focus is primarily on the German and Spanish markets, which showed more or less timid performance in the first quarter of the year. We note an increase of 3 and 1% respectively in their tourist arrivals. These market sheets produced regularly by the tourism observatory represent a kind of monitoring allowing us to monitor demand and tourism trends in the main source markets. These publications make it possible to profile the Moroccan tourism clientele as well as to evaluate trends and developments in the market.
If we take the case of the German market, we note the arrival of 144,751 tourists from this destination in the first three months of the current year. These arrivals recovered by 3% compared to the same period of the year and by 64% compared to 2010. However, the share of the German market in the structure of tourist arrivals at border crossings has evolved timidly throughout the last ten years. It increased from 5% in the first quarter of 2010 to 6% at the end of March 2019.
As for the data collected at the level of classified accommodation establishments, the Germans would have recorded overnight stays for the first three months of the year down by 2% compared to the same period last year. Despite this drop, nights spent by German tourists recovered by 85% compared to 2010. By analyzing the seasonal variation in German arrivals in Morocco between 2018 and 2017, the tourism observatory notes two peaks particularly in the months of March and October. Periods which correspond to school holidays in Germany, notably Easter and All Saints’ Day. As for the preferences of German tourists, these travelers choose Morocco for its climate and also for the discovery of its sites and monuments. German tourists are generally loyal to the destination Agadir where they spend 8 days. However, new Moroccan stopovers are beginning to interest these visitors, particularly Dakhla where the observatory shows an average length of stay of 7.2 days. German tourists often go to Morocco as a couple. They also favor classified hotels, notably 4 stars (34.7% of overnight stays in 2018), club hotels (29.8%) and 5 star hotels (19.2%).
source: today.ma
