Madrid is the seat of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), so it makes sense that the city hosts a yearly International Tourism Fair – Feria Internacional del TURismo, or FITUR. For years, I had been hearing how amazing it was, and how many networking opportunities for travellers there were.

I had wanted to snoop around for as long as it came on my radar, but timing never worked out until this year. I bought a general entry ticket and hoped for decent enough weather to be able to drive to IFEMA – where I can get in 40 minutes on my car or 3 hours by public transport. I’m not even kidding. IFEMA parking lot is chaotic, and so is the nearby Parque Juan Carlos I one. However, if you’re willing to add a 10 minutes’ walk to the experience, there is another convenient lot nearby you can use, where I directly headed upon seeing how traffic was. That should’ve given me an idea of the mayhem and overcrowding I was going to find inside.

FITUR takes up most of IFEMA, which makes sense considering how much money tourism makes around the world. According to the UNWTO, there were 1.52 billion international tourists around the world in 2025, and 2.2 trillion US dollars in revenue from the industry. The catchphrase of this year’s FITUR edition was “where journeys begin”, so I thought that worst case scenario, I would come back with a bunch of leaflets of cool places I wanted to visit.

Upon entering the convention centre, the first thing I found was a recreation of the new Egyptian archaeology museum in Cairo. However, the reproductions of the pieces were… bad, almost childlike. I walked into the first pavilion – Europe. There I found a lot of stands, but the catch was that very few of them held actual information about countries, most were travel agencies advertising their products. I secured some information about Sardinia, because I have wanted to go there to see the Mont’e Prama Archaeological site since I learnt about the Giants. The lady was nice enough to give me a tote bag, though I was carrying my own.

The Africa pavilion had about twenty stands of companies organising safaris, some of them even playing into the Great White Hunter stereotype! I got a few leaflets from them too. In Asia Pacific I was scolded for calling Australia an “island” and not a continent (hm, hello Oceania?) and the business pavilion was so empty it looked like a completely different fair.

Next, I headed off towards the three interconnected pavilions that made up Spain. Here I started encountering mini-parades representing different tourist resources in the country. At one point I found myself surrounded by a re-enactment of the Crucifixion (Holy Week), the ladies from Valencia’s Fallas festival and a small batallion of Napoleonic troops. Here I did find actual information stands about regions and not travel agents’, but when I had questions about specific recommendations, I was irrevocably directed to “check the website”. There were never-ending queues whenever any stand gave out anything – blocking the ways and aisles – and whenever there was anything related to food, such as samples, visitors almost came to blows. I did my best to avoid all of them.

At one point I did come across a company that prided itself in “solo travel” – they even had it in the name. Upon a slight enquire, I found out that they… charge supplementary fees to solo travellers. Like, what? However, it was the Americas pavilion that broke me in the end. I got shoved twice, almost to the ground, around the Argentina stand, only to be unable to find any information regarding Patagonia’s MEF (the reportedly most important dinosaur collection in South America, and where the Patagonian Dinosaur Exhibition originated).

All in all, my FITUR experience felt bizarre and extremely overcrowded. It was like paying to have the right to be bombarded by travel agency commercials. Not disappointed, but having realised that FITUR was not for me, I decided to head back to the car and drive off. I had been there for around three hours, and taken a walk around the whole fair. At first I thought I would stop for junk food, but it was too cold even for that, so I just headed home, with a bunch of leaflets and a list of websites to look at. Most of the brochures are still sitting on the shelf…