EU tourism nights recover to 95% of 2019 level

Thursday, March 16, 2023

After the decline experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the total number of nights spent in EU tourist accommodation reached 2.73 billion in 2022.

This marks a 5% difference compared with the number of nights spent in 2019 (2.88 billion nights).

Compared with 2021 (1.83 billion nights), nights spent were up by 49% in 2022.

In the course of 2022, tourism figures in all months were higher than the corresponding months in 2021, with the fourth quarter of 2022 recording 472 million nights.

This was a decline of only 2% compared with the pre-pandemic fourth quarter of 2019 (483 million nights). 

This information comes from data on tourism up to December 2022 published by Eurostat today.

This article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

In the beginning of 2022, tourism levels were much lower than the same months in 2019. However, starting in May 2022, the difference became less noticeable.

For the remainder of the year, nights spent in tourist accommodation were less than 5% lower than 2019, and in July, August, September, and October, they were less than 1% lower than the same months in 2019.

Data for 2022 also show that nights spent by domestic guests exceeded 2019 levels (1.53 billion nights in 2022 compared with 1.51 billion nights in 2019; +1%).

On the other hand, nights spent by international guests were close to full recovery, but still some way off (1.20 billion nights in 2022 compared with 1.36 billion in 2019; -12%).

Among the EU countries, Latvia was the furthest from full recovery in terms of nights spent by international guests (-45% in 2022 compared with 2019), followed by Slovakia (-40%) and Lithuania (-37%).

Denmark was the only EU member to record an increase in nights spent by international guests (+4%), while Croatia (-2%) and Luxembourg (-3%) came close. 

On the other hand, Malta recorded the highest increase in nights spent by domestic guests (+39% in 2022 compared with 2019), followed by Cyprus (+35%) and Slovenia (+25%).

The largest drops in nights spent by domestic guests were recorded in Slovakia (-22%), Romania (-15%) and Hungary (-13%), all of which also recorded rather large decreases in nights spent by international guests (at least -30%).

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