The role of innovation in the Spanish Tourism policy

Abstract

The Spanish tourism policy has been analyzed distinguishing different historical stages and providing examples of innovations for each stage. From the 50s to the 80s tourism policy was a central government issue but the Spanish Constitution brought a radical change decentralizing competences towards the autonomous regions from that moment entitled to develop their own policies. In that new scenario the need for coordination was crucial and new structures were created to discussed issues between these two governmental scales. The decade from the 80s to the 90s was characterized by a perception of crisis of the tourism model of development and this lead to the design of more innovative policies. In this period appeared for the first time the concept of innovation as policy programme. In the last and more recent stage identified, innovation adopts a more predominant role and becomes a central issue to compete as part of a new economy strategy. Examples of innovative actions and projects are provided for each stage. For the first stage, the governmental entrepreneurial project of creating a hotel chain, Paradores, has been described. By the time it was an innovative instrument of policy oriented to develop a quality hotel offer and at the same time maintaining and giving value to historical buildings used as poles of tourism development and private investment attraction. For the second and third stages, the examples provided are focused on attempts to innovate in complex scenarios of mass tourism destinations: Calvià, a sun and beach destination from the Majorca island and Playa de Palma a pilot project destination selected to participated in an integral development project of renovation. These last projects ended up having scarce results in terms of effective innovation. Different conclusions might be observed: 1) periods of crisis have stimulated further innovation. External-internal changes are drivers of innovation; 2) in order to remain competitive, many creative and new strategies have been tested but only few could be considered innovations in the sense of effective and successful implementation; 3) there is always an implementation gap when innovative ideas are tried to be brought into practice.