Moventis has called for Barcelona to focus on managing how visitors move through the city, rather than on reducing tourist numbers, arguing that better transport planning could ease congestion for residents and visitors alike. Speaking on Saturday 5 July at the second edition of El Confidencial's forum Catalonia, investment destination, Ian Livesey said tourist arrivals should be channelled from airports, stations and the port to hotels, leisure sites and other destinations through collective transport instead of individual cars.

The comments matter for residents in areas that regularly face heavy visitor pressure, including the Gothic Quarter and Barceloneta, where crowding, coaches and private vehicles have long been part of the wider overtourism debate. Livesey spoke on the panel Tourism, mobility and economic development in Catalonia alongside Choni Fernández, operations and sustainable innovation director at PortAventura, and José Antonio Donaire, Barcelona City Council's commissioner for sustainable tourism management, according to the Ajuntament de Barcelona tourism management pages.

"The challenge is to properly manage tourist flows from major entry points, airports, stations and ports, towards leisure centres, hotels and complementary destinations."

Livesey is business director for customer and company travel at Moventis, the passenger transport arm of the Catalan group Moventia. He argued that the aim should be to reconcile tourism with daily life in the city by reducing unnecessary traffic.

"In mobility, we must be intelligent and try to reconcile tourism with residents' lives. Reducing congestion within the city also improves the experience for residents."

He said the priority was to plan arrivals using collective, last-mile distribution and sustainable transport, so visitors do not each travel separately in private vehicles. In his words, a bus does not clog the city in the same way that many individual cars would.

That argument also aligns with Moventis's wider business position on low-emission and collective mobility. The company said in May that it would add 95 sustainable vehicles to its urban and intercity fleet after an extra investment of €30.5 million, according to a company announcement.

Livesey calls for tourism to be spread beyond Barcelona

Livesey said Barcelona should also work to spread tourism more evenly across Catalonia and across the year, instead of concentrating demand in the same places and the same peak periods. He described two priorities as central: organising mobility better and reducing the sector's seasonal peaks.

"Two elements are needed: adequate infrastructure and a complementary offering to Barcelona that is attractive and consistent with the visitor's profile."

For residents, that would mean fewer visitor vehicles and less concentrated footfall in the most saturated parts of the city if more arrivals were directed to other destinations and times of year. It would also mean relying more on shared transport links from entry points than on private transfers into central neighbourhoods.

  • Manage arrivals from airports, railway stations and the port through collective transport
  • Improve infrastructure linking Barcelona with other destinations in Catalonia
  • Spread tourism across more months of the year instead of the busiest peaks

He also called for closer cooperation between public authorities and private operators, with what he described as constant, clear and practical communication. Livesey said administrations should make planning, regulation and space allocation easier for mobility systems to work.

Barcelona's tourism commissioner has publicly argued in other forums that the issue is not only the volume of tourists but how they use the city, a line that broadly overlaps with Livesey's position. Critics of this approach, including some residents' groups and campaigners in neighbourhoods affected by overtourism, argue that flow management alone may not solve housing pressure, noise and public space conflicts.

No new city measure was announced at the forum

Livesey also said Barcelona functions as a major European arrival point for long-haul travellers and argued that this strengthens the case for better onward transport planning. No new municipal rule, funding package or timetable was announced during the forum discussion.

Readers who want to follow the city's tourism management debate can track updates through the Ajuntament de Barcelona's tourism management channels. For transport services linked to visitor and group mobility, Moventis publishes updates on its official news page. BARNA has also reported on the wider debate around Catalonia's investment, transport and tourism model in this earlier coverage.

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