King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain are continuing a hectic week of official engagements. When reunited in Madrid, they opened FITUR, the tourism fair that constitutes an annual appointment for the couple.
Upon their arrival at the IFEMA complex where the fair is hosted, the King and Queen, who were accompanied by many state and local authorities, including the President of the House of Representatives, the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, and the Mayor of Madrid, were welcomed by the President of the IFEMA executive committee and the President of Guatemala.
The latter was welcomed afterwards at Zarzuela Palace for a lunch meeting with the King; he was in Spain specifically for FITUR, as Guatemala is one of the featured countries of this edition of the fair.
King Felipe and Queen Letizia subsequently began their tour of the installation, starting at pavilion ten, where they visited the stands of FITUR Women, Hotusa, World2meet and Iberia, the latter being the flagship airline of Spain.
They then moved on to pavilion nine for a peek at the stands of Turespaña and Madrid before continuing to pavilion seven to look at the stands for the two autonomic communities of Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura.
Their next stop was pavilion three, where they received a tour of the Guatemala and Dominican Republic stands before finishing their tour with the Italian stand in pavilion four and the Indian stand in pavilion six.
This year’s edition of FITUR will be marked by the rapid boom of the tourism sector, which took off again after two years of almost complete stop because of health safety restrictions.
According to official data, the fair has regained the same space of the last edition pre-pandemic (which was in January 2020) in terms of occupied surface and has seen increases in all indicator percentages, like the number of businesses and foreign countries taking part, as well as predicted revenue.
