We recommend you to read the following article, published at the Financial Times. It refers to the challenges Barcelona faces through the increase of the "cheap travellers".

By Rahul Jacob

Published:November 17 2006 12:16

Like so many journeys these days, this one had begun as the most casual of impulses. A few clicks of the mouse later, I had a round-trip ticket to Barcelona for the following weekend for less than £130. I was still marvelling at the ease with which we travel these days when reality quickly caught up with me. I tried nearly half-a-dozen hotels over the next couple of days and could not get a room. The Banys Orientals was fully booked and so was the Hotel Pulitzer. In fact, as I discovered when I happened to wander into its stylish, Asian-inspired lobby a few days later, the Banys Orientals is usually booked solid a couple of months in advance. I finally got a room at a decidedly uninspired business hotel.

When a couple of friends and I arrived at London’s Gatwick airport to catch our mid-afternoon flight that weekend, the queue to check in stretched all the way out to the car park. I was certain our flight would take off late because hardly anyone was at the gate until suddenly an entire group of Japanese and British package-tour travellers seemingly dropped out of the sky, looking in that futuristic extension of Gatwick like models for a Magritte painting, minus the bowler hats. Packed flights and full hotels in this era of perpetual travel are hardly unheard of but Barcelona seems, in many ways, the archetypal mass tourism metropolis of the 21st century...

Link below to the full article

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5b86b094-7630-11db-8284-0000779e2340.html