EU Tourism Overview

The page “EU Tourism Overview” provides information on tourism performance and investment in tourism-related sectors across the European Economic Area and associated countries at the national, NUTS 1, and NUTS 2 levels. Seven variables are visualized: tourist arrivals, nights spent, bed-places, establishments, and short-stay accommodation units, as well as Gross Fixed Capital Formation and Gross Value Added in trade, motor vehicles’ repair, transporting and storage, and accommodation and food service (NACE codes G, H, I). Beyond absolute values, data on arrivals, guest nights, bed-places, establishments, and short-stay accommodation units can be weighted by population or area. This allows comparisons between the tourism performance of regions with different sizes, both population- and area-wise. Moreover, this allows an assessment of the pressure imposed by tourism activity on local populations, as well as the physical and built environment.

Note: Tourist arrivals, nights spent, bed-places, and establishments refer to all types of tourist accommodation establishments: hotels, holiday and other short-stay accommodation, camping grounds, and recreational vehicle parks and trailer parks. However, Eurostat allows National Statistical Authorities to ignore establishments with fewer than 10 bed-places, with this threshold increasing in smaller tourism markets. As such, many short-term rentals are omitted from these figures. To overcome this shortcoming, Eurostat has started collecting more precise data on the short-term rental market in direct collaboration with pertinent platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Booking, HomeAway, etc.). The latter data refers to the “short-stay accommodation” variable that is included here.

Overall, the above data illustrate key aspects of the tourism industry across the broader European Economic Area, allowing for direct comparisons between different regional tourism markets.