Tourism revives in major European capitals, Paris leads the way

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Tourism is recovering in major European capitals after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is also obvious from the large number of jobs that are again available in tourism.

It is worth mentioning that the jobs in the two years that followed the COVID-19 pandemic shrank significantly.

People are starting to travel again after the COVID-19 travel restrictions were lifted. Now everyone wants to travel and visit their favorite places again.

One of the favorite cities for travel is Paris, which quickly recovered in terms of tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic compared to other European cities.

In this article, we will talk about Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, and Madrid.

In these five economies, travel and tourism contributed more than 83.5 billion dollars in 2022, up from 71 billion dollars in 2021, reducing the contribution by 15% compared to 2019.

Paris presented the more robust recovery of the cities mentioned above, with the other four sitting between 18% and 30% lower than in 2019, showing a slightly slower recovery than the French capital.

The tourism sector’s contribution to the GDP of Paris was $38 billion in 2019. Still, in 2022 it recovered just 6% below pre-pandemic levels to $35.7 billion.

Although the sector’s contribution to London’s GDP reached $15 billion in 2022, it was slightly below Berlin’s recovery rate, with tourism contributing to the German capital’s economy at $7.7 billion in 2022, 18% below 2019.

The contribution of tourism to Madrid’s GDP was over $5.5 billion in 2022, 24% below 2019.

However, Rome is showing the slowest recovery, -30% below 2019 levels, with the sector contributing almost 7 billion dollars.

From the above, it appears that travelers are returning massively to Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid, and Rome. At the same time, there is an increase in business travel.

The fact that the Chinese can now travel more freely in Europe is also positive. It is a fact that tourists are a driving force in the economy and the creation of jobs.

In terms of tourism jobs in the 5 European cities, there were over 976,000 travel and tourism jobs in the five cities just before the pandemic.

In 2020, the number of jobs in tourism in the five European capitals fell by 41% to just over 580,000 jobs.

The following year, the number of jobs increased by 13% to 654,000, and last year, the number of jobs increased again by 23% to 807,000, just 17% below 2019.

Paris currently has the largest travel and tourism job market of the five capitals, with almost 322,000 jobs.

But business trips also boost tourism.

Business trips, which had stopped due to the coronavirus, have now started again. Suffice it to say that business travel to Spain is forecast to exceed 75% of 2019 levels by the end of 2023.

The industries that saw a large increase in business travel spending in 2022 were: finance and insurance, consulting, software, and technology.

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