European Leisure Travel Statistics / Effect of economic downturn

August 5, 2009 7:00 PM

How badly has the economy affected leisure travel to Europe over the summer of 2009?

How are the major tourism destinations in Europe weathering the current economic conditions?

Any ideas on where I could find multi-year travel statistics?

Any personal feedback from those who are living in or who may have traveled through Europe would be appreciated.

posted by cheez-it to travel & transportation (7 comments total)

Well, for one, the dollar's doing much better against the Euro/Pound as it was this time a year ago. It's a lot cheaper to go over there.
posted by jgunsch at 7:33 PM on August 5

Data point: I just returned from the Greek islands a couple of weeks ago. I heard repeatedly from hotel managers, cafe and restaurant waiters, and others that this is an exceptionally bad year for tourism.
posted by googly at 7:53 PM on August 5

While the EU does have a union wide directive towards collecting aggregate tourism data across Europe ( Council Directive 95/57/EC ) I can't find an on line source for the information. Maybe someone can find it based on that directive, but I'm foxed?

However I spent a lot of time in Madird and still read Spanish newspapers online; tourism in that country (which is probably indicative of all tourist destinations), isn't doing well at all and is in the news often. This information is YOY as of June 2009.

Total number of foreign visitors -9.4%
Tourism receipts -10.1%

Full YOY data is here. They might have historical buried in there somewhere.

While these declines are fairly large, they certainly aren't the end of the world scenarios many predicted at the onset of the credit crunch.

From personal experience I can report that all summer long the British media has been full of news about "staycations", where folks either take their holiday in the UK or simply stay home.
posted by Mutant at 1:48 AM on August 6

The number of visits to the UK, both from other parts of Europe and from North America appears to have dropped slightly but not too significantly.

On the ground here - we live next to the British Museum - I didn't notice any appreciable change from last year to this year. Also, oddly enough, the bulk of foreign tourists appear to be Spaniards.
posted by vacapinta at 2:07 AM on August 6

I was in Spain & Italy for two weeks, and heard much the same from hotel workers, cruise personnel, taxi drivers, and the like: definitely less tourists. (Although our cruise was still sold out, so go figure.)
posted by gushn at 7:08 AM on August 6

For Italy, you want ISTAT (Hotel Stats Press Releases, Tourism & Transport Section).

Those last two links I think would be what you're looking for, but they're in Italian. A quick perusal of the English version of the site gave me bupkis, but I'll cop to finding the English version to be even more irritating to navigate than the Italian.

And on the ground: yes, less tourists.
posted by romakimmy at 7:49 AM on August 6

And if I had bothered to fully parse Mutant's comment & check out ISTAT's links page at the same time, I'd have found EUROSTAT's tourism section earlier, which you might also find useful.
posted by romakimmy at 8:05 AM on August 6 [1 favorite has favorites]