Eurostat: Domestic tourism - a constant of the winter holidays

Our country ranks first in the European Union, in terms of the number of domestic tourist trips registered in December 2022, according to Eurostat data, according to a press release published on Friday by the institution from Brussels.

Statistics show that 17.1% (3,127,711 trips) of the total number of tourist trips recorded in 2022 (18,295,209 trips) were made in December, which places our country in first place this month, followed by Bulgaria - 12.5% and Malta 11.8%. At the bottom of the European ranking are Sweden with 6.4%, Lithuania - 6% and Greece 5.2%. The EU average is 8.6% for domestic tourism in December 2022.

From the Eurostat data, we also note that tourism is returning to the values recorded before the pandemic. Thus, if in 2019 our country reported 19,374,651 tourist trips, at the end of 2022 there were 18,295,209 tourist trips, which provides the prerequisites for reaching at the end of 2023 the value of 2019 or being close to it.

The quoted source also shows that in the last month of 2022, citizens of the European Union made 92 million tourist trips, which represents 8.6% of all trips made in that year. Of these, 73 million were domestic trips, representing 9% of all domestic trips made in 2022. Another 19 million trips were made abroad, representing 7.1% of all foreign trips.

Eurostat data shows that the tradition of increasing domestic tourism during the winter holidays is maintained. Thus, in December 2022, the number of domestic trips was almost 4 times higher than the number of trips abroad (in the other months of the year, the number of domestic trips was on average 3 times higher than the number of trips abroad). The increase in domestic trips during the year-end period is also due to people visiting their friends and relatives in other localities in the country during this period, with more than half of domestic trips in December 2022 reporting this purpose.

We note that in the Eurostat report, only trips that included at least one night's accommodation in another locality were taken into account.