World Cup boosts Chinese tourists' interest in Spain: retailers prepare for Golden Week

Published on

23/07/2026 - 21:58 GMT+2

Spain's World Cup victory has fuelled interest among Chinese tourists in visiting the country and opens up an opportunity for retailers ahead of Golden Week, one of China's main holiday periods, according to data from travel platform Qunar compiled by Spanish company Stamp.

Searches for flights between Shenzhen and Barcelona rose thirty-three-fold in the hours following La Roja's triumph, while searches for Tenerife were up nineteen times and those for Malaga 10.5 times.

More broadly, according to a 2024 study by the University of Aberdeen published in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, winning the World Cup raises the champion country's year-on-year GDP growth by at least 0.48% over the two quarters after the final, before the effect fades, even though the sample of winners analysed is inevitably small. Applied to the size of the Spanish economy, at 1.69 trillion euros, that estimated increase would amount to around 4 billion euros.