When Natalia Boveda stands up in front of travel professionals at a trade show or roadshow, she opens with the same question every time: “When you think of the Costa Del Sol, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”

She already knows the answer. Sun. Beach. Summer. Package holidays. An image built over decades, from the tourism boom of the sixties and seventies through to the mass-market era of the eighties and nineties. It is an image that served the destination well for a long time. But it is also, increasingly, the thing that holds it back.

“OK, I’m going to try to change your mind right now,” she tells them. “Because it’s not exactly what we’ve been promoting.”

Speaking on the latest episode of the Balancing Tourism Podcast, Boveda set out a case that will be familiar to any DMO managing an established destination with a strong seasonal identity: the product has evolved far beyond the brand, and the hardest job is getting the market to catch up.

When Your Biggest Market Thinks It Already Knows You

The British market is the Costa Del Sol’s number one source market. It is also, in many ways, the hardest audience to reach with a repositioning message. British visitors have been coming to the Costa Del Sol for generations. Many feel they already know the destination. That sense of familiarity, Boveda argues, is precisely the barrier.

“It’s very hard to break that kind of barrier when you have that in mind,” she said. “I can tell you, I can show you videos, I can show you pictures, but you have to come. And once you come, that’s when everything changes.”

This is a strategic problem that extends well beyond content and creative. The province of Malaga, which the Costa Del Sol encompasses, has more than 100 municipalities, 165 kilometres of coastline, and some of the most mountainous terrain in Spain. The city of Malaga itself has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past two decades, growing from a transit point to a serious short-break destination with more than 100 hotels in the city centre and over 30 museums. The product has diversified significantly. But if your core source market’s mental model was set 20 or 30 years ago, awareness doesn’t follow automatically.

Boveda described taking groups of UK travel professionals on winter fam trips into the province’s inland villages and watching their reactions. People who had been visiting the Costa Del Sol for years were encountering a version of it they had never seen.

“They would say, ‘I would have never, ever thought this was here, and I’ve been coming for years.’ And it’s just a few minutes away.”

For DMOs in a similar position, this points to a specific tactical priority: trade education. Consumer marketing alone will not close a perception gap this wide. The intermediaries, the agents, the operators, the content creators, need to experience the updated product before they can sell it.

A Deliberate Decision to Stop Selling Peak

Costa Del Sol Tourism has made a clear strategic call: they no longer promote the summer season.

“We’re never, ever going to promote the summer anymore. We don’t need it,” Boveda said. The summer traveller is loyal, the destination is well-established in peak season, and the infrastructure handles the volume. All co-marketing spend with airlines, tour operators and agencies is now directed exclusively at the low and shoulder seasons.

That is a significant strategic position for a major European DMO to take, and it reflects a level of confidence in the peak product that not every destination can claim. But for those that can, the logic is worth examining. Every euro spent promoting July to a market that was coming anyway is a euro not spent building demand in February. If the peak looks after itself, the marketing budget becomes entirely a deseasonalisation tool.

The shift also changes the conversation with trade partners. When co-marketing with an airline or operator is conditional on promoting shoulder or low-season travel, it sends a clear signal about the destination’s priorities and gives partners confidence that the DMO is investing in periods where they genuinely need support filling capacity.

Structured Collaboration on Connectivity

Air connectivity is central to the Costa Del Sol’s deseasonalisation effort. Malaga is the third-largest airport in Spain, handling nearly 27 million passengers last year. But scale alone does not solve the seasonality problem. What matters is how the various stakeholders coordinate.

A formal committee meets every two months, bringing together AENA (the airport operator), Costa Del Sol Tourism, the regional government of Andalusia, the city of Malaga, and Turespana (the national tourism agency). The discussions are operational: which airlines are considering new routes, what market data they need to build the business case, where co-marketing spend should be directed to support low-season frequencies, and how the various bodies can avoid duplicating effort.

Crucially, the structure allows for flexibility. If one partner lacks budget for a particular airline campaign in a given period, another may step in. The shared intelligence means all parties are working from the same picture of where the gaps are and where the opportunities lie.

“We actually filter all the information they need,” Boveda said of their approach to airline engagement. “Not all the big data we have, but just the data they are looking for.”

This is a model worth studying. Many destinations operate with fragmented stakeholder relationships, where the DMO, the airport, the regional government and the national tourism body each pursue their own airline conversations independently. The Costa Del Sol’s bimonthly committee creates a single, coordinated channel. It reduces noise for airlines and increases the credibility of the destination’s pitch.

“It’s a two-way road,” Boveda explained. “If they see that we cooperate, they feel that we want them to succeed.”

Early Evidence of a Flattening Curve

The results are starting to show. Boveda pointed to one telling indicator: hotels along the Costa Del Sol that used to close entirely during December and January for renovations are no longer doing so. Winter occupancy is climbing. November figures, she said, have been particularly strong in recent years.

The destination’s shoulder months are beginning to flatten towards the summer peak, a trend visible in published tourism data. The Costa Del Sol is not yet a perfectly balanced year-round destination, and Boveda is realistic about that. Summer will always be the high point. But the trajectory is clear, and it is being driven by intentional strategy rather than market forces alone.

“If things go right, or at least normal, I think we’re going to get to a place where we are more balanced the whole year,” she said. “And I know that for a fact, because it’s actually happening.”

For an industry that often talks about deseasonalisation in aspirational terms, the Costa Del Sol offers a useful corrective. The progress is measurable, the strategy is explicit, and the timescale is long. This is not a two-year marketing push. It is a structural repositioning that has been building for more than two decades.

What’s Transferable

Not every element of the Costa Del Sol’s approach will translate directly to other destinations. Few places share its combination of a mild winter climate, a major international airport, and a 60-year brand legacy to work with and against. But several of the principles are broadly applicable.

First, the discipline of deciding what not to promote. If peak season demand is self-sustaining, redirecting the full marketing budget to low and shoulder periods is a straightforward decision in theory and a difficult one in practice, because it means accepting that some months will receive no promotional support at all.

Second, the value of structured stakeholder coordination. The bimonthly committee model, bringing together the airport, DMO, regional government and national tourism agency around a shared dataset and a shared strategy, removes duplication and presents a unified case to airlines. That coordination is replicable regardless of destination size.

Third, the priority of trade education over consumer marketing when closing a perception gap. Boveda’s winter fam trips changed the minds of professionals who had been visiting for years. That kind of experiential trade engagement is expensive per head but efficient per conversion, because each operator or agent who updates their understanding of the destination multiplies the message through their own customer base.

And finally, patience. The Costa Del Sol’s curve is flattening, but it has taken sustained effort over many years. De-seasonalisation does not lend itself to quick wins. The destinations that succeed will be the ones that commit to a long-term structural programme and measure progress in years, not quarters.

Hear More at the Tourism Seasonality Summit

Natalia Boveda will be speaking at the Tourism Seasonality Summit on 17–18 May in Rimini, Italy, co-located with Routes Europe. She joins a panel titled “Beyond Summer: Crafting New Experiences to Extend Seasonality,” alongside speakers from the US Virgin Islands, Sicily and other destinations working through the same structural challenges discussed in this article.

The Summit brings together senior leaders from DMOs, airlines, hotel groups and governments for two days focused on how the industry spreads demand more evenly across the calendar and across geographies.

Places are limited. Find the full programme and register at seasonalitysummit.com.

This article is based on an episode of the Balancing Tourism Podcast, hosted by Ged Brown, Founder of Low Season Traveller and the Tourism Seasonality Summit.