A family looking through a window of a hotel room.

In the first quarter of 2024, there were 452.6 million overnight stays in tourist accommodations across the EU, marking a 7% increase compared with the same quarter of 2023. January recorded 133.9 million nights (+3% compared with January 2023), February 149.2 million (+6%) and March 169.5 million (+9%).

This information comes from monthly data on tourist accommodation up to March 2024 published by Eurostat today. This article presents a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

Foreign visitors accounted for approximately 45% of all overnight stays in the first three months of 2024, with large differences among EU countries. The biggest share of foreign overnight stays at the beginning of the year was recorded in Malta (91%), Cyprus (87%), Luxembourg (82%) and Austria (78%).

Overnight stays by guests from foreign country, January-March 2024, % of all nights spent. Chart. See link to full dataset below.

Source dataset: tour_occ_nim

In contrast, foreign guests accounted for only one-fifth of overnight stays in Poland, Romania and Germany (19%, 20% and 20%, respectively).

In the first quarter of 2024, the increase in nights spent by foreign visitors (+11% compared with the first quarter of 2023) was much more pronounced than the increase in domestic nights (+4%). The largest increases in overnight stays by foreign visitors were recorded in Cyprus (+23%), Croatia (+22%), Malta and Luxembourg (both +21%). At the other end of the range, the smallest increases were recorded in Lithuania, Poland and Greece (all +3%).

For more information

Methodological notes

  • Data not available for Ireland.
  • Nights spent: a night spent (or overnight stay) is each night a guest/tourist (resident or non-resident) actually spends (sleeps or stays) in a tourist accommodation establishment or non-rented accommodation. This article focuses only on nights spent in tourist accommodation establishment, while non-rented accommodation is out of the scope of this release.
  • Tourism accommodation establishments are classified and described in groups according to the statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community (NACE) Rev. 2 classification as follows:
    • I551 (hotels and similar accommodation)
    • I552 (holiday and other short-stay accommodation)
    • I553 (camping grounds, recreational vehicle parks and trailer parks)

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