The regional data for 2022 on the number of holidaymakers staying in short term accommodation provided by Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group and TripAdvisor show that the gradual growth of holiday tourism from pre-pandemic times is distributed in a disjointed way across Europe.
The progress of the sector
Rural areas in countries such as Poland, France or Sweden have shown high growth rates, while city destinations such as Berlin, Prague and Vienna are still at a slow pace compared to the 2019 values.
In 2022 the total number of overnight stays in the EU will grow by around 7%, from 512 million in 2019 to 547 million in 2022, but this total growth will have widely divergent results at regional level. The 2019 data will be used as a benchmark to establish a pre-pandemic baseline.
Eurostat has published data at regional and city level for 2022 and data at national and EU level for the first quarter of 2023. These data are collected by four private collaborative economy organisations under an agreement with the European Commission in March 2020. Regional data will be distributed at a quarter of the rate of national data according to the rules laid down in the agreement.
Growing rural areas
According to the data, growth rates in EU regions of moderate tourism importance (defined here as regions with less than 1 million travellers in 2022) oscillate between -52% for Prague and +93% for Franche-Comté. Of the ten regions with the highest growth rates, nine were rural regions in France, while other high-growth areas were in Poland, Germany and Sweden.
Among the regions with the highest losses compared to 2019 are Prague (-52%), Berlin (-39%), Budapest (-34%) and Vienna (-25%).
Taking the figures as given, of the first 20 most populous regions in Europe, six were in Spain and France, five in Italy, two in Portugal and one (No 1 on the list) in Croatia. Apart from urban regions such as Paris and Madrid, these regions are all coastal areas along the Mediterranean or Atlantic coasts.
In the first quarter of 2023, EU spending exceeded the previous high levels (2020 for May and February; 2022 for March) in all three months. Finally, in 2023, 83.9 million overnight stays in short-term accommodation were booked through one of the four platforms, compared to 67.3 million in Q1 2022. The majority of the overnight stays was spent in France (22.0 million), Spain (18.2 million) and Italy (9.7 million).
Article seen on (Eurostat): Nights booked via online platforms: uneven EU growth
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