Wealthy tourists, underpaid staff: Can Barcelona's new tourism strategy fix precarious jobs?

Barcelona has been recently promoting a tourism model centered on 'quality tourism', seeking wealthier visitors who stay longer, travel throughout the year, and spread across Catalonia.

The official argument is that this type of visitor can help create more stable and higher-quality jobs, especially if demand is spread across the year to reduce seasonal employment.

Critics, however, argue that this model does not necessarily translate into better working conditions. While quality tourism may create more jobs than short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb, the benefits are far from evenly distributed.

At the same time, reversing the structural issues of the sector remains difficult: tourism jobs are among the lowest paid, and wage inequality within the sector is striking.

How salaries compare to other sectors

According to official government data, the average annual salary of a tourism-sector worker in Catalonia was €23,619 in 2023, the most recent year with available figures. This is 22% below the Catalan average of €30,500.

In Barcelona, where the economy depends more heavily on tourism, the gap is even wider. The city's average pre-tax salary in 2023 was €35,813, while workers in the sector earned 26% less, averaging €26,515, according to the Tourism Observatory of Barcelona.

The situation has improved slightly compared to the pandemic years, when the gap widened to 43%, and the disparity is now closer to pre-pandemic levels.

Yet averages hide even deeper divides. A small minority of workers earn significantly more, while the majority remain at the bottom of the pay scale.

The lowest-paid jobs are in food and beverage services such as cooks and waitstaff in bars and restaurants, who earn an average of €18,911 per year. This is also the largest category, comprising nearly half of all tourism workers in Barcelona.

Accommodation services, such as hotel staff, make up the second-largest group, accounting for 14% of contracts. Their average salary, €24,188 annually, also falls below the sector-wide average.

Together, these two categories represent 68% of all jobs in the sector, both well under the overall average wage.

By contrast, higher-paid jobs are fewer in number. Tourism-related transport workers earn €37,595 on average, but represent just 13% of the workforce, driven largely by better-paid positions in air travel.

Travel agency and tour operator staff also enjoy higher pay, averaging €34,785, though they account for only 5% of workers. Similarly, jobs in "other services", a category covering car rentals, entertainment, or trade fair organization, average €37,484.

Despite persistent pay inequalities, one positive trend in recent years has been the reduction of temporary contracts, a long-standing issue in the tourism industry.

Before the pandemic, more than 30% of tourism workers in Catalonia were on temporary contracts. Today, that number has fallen to 13%, very close to the overall Catalan average of 12%.

This improvement is partly due to the quality tourism strategy, which encourages visitors to spread their trips throughout the year. In 2025, for example, visitor numbers in Catalonia grew 12% in January while declining 1% in July.

Labor reforms passed by the Spanish Congress have also contributed, making it easier to reduce temporary contracts and promote more stable employment in the sector.

Can wealthier tourists solve the problem?

"Tourism is not a very good distributor of wealth," says José Mansilla, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) specializing in tourism, speaking to Catalan News. "It’s an activity that does not pay very well to the workers but gets high returns to business owners," he adds.

According to Mansilla, in most sectors in Spain, profits are split roughly 50–50 between business owners and employees. In tourism, however, "that distribution goes to 80% for the employer and 20% for the worker."

His research has also documented exploitative practices. In one case, he found that one of Barcelona’s most luxurious hotels was seeking nine interns for the month of August with a salary of just €450. "That is less than what they make for one room in one night," he explains. "It is not an internship, it is free labour."

Carla Izcara, a researcher at Alba Sud specializing in tourism, shares similar concerns. "Not because tourists have a higher acquisitive power, it means that then there is a major redistribution of the benefits," she says.

"This type of tourism does not raise salaries nor create better working conditions. Sometimes it even increases the use of water, resources, and energy. At a social level, what it does is generate more exclusive spaces," she adds.