The number of international tourist arrivals to the selected European destinations increased significantly in 2023 over the previous year, experiencing strong signs of recovery from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in some cases even surpassing pre-pandemic levels. Overall, Paris and the Île-de-France region recorded the highest figure among the selected destinations in 2023, with around **** million inbound tourist arrivals. London and Istanbul followed in the ranking that year, with roughly **** million and **** million arrivals, respectively. What are the most visited countries by international tourists? Both before and after the health crisis, France was the country with the highest number of inbound tourist arrivals worldwide. In 2023, inbound arrivals to France reached *** million, the highest figure reported by the country to date. Meanwhile, the United States, which ranked third by inbound arrivals that year, was the country with the highest international tourism receipts worldwide. Has inbound tourism recovered from the impact of COVID-19? While the number of international tourist arrivals worldwide grew sharply in 2023 compared to the previous year, it remained approximately ** percent lower than in 2019. Overall, the total contribution of travel and tourism to the global GDP was **** percent below pre-pandemic levels in 2023.

Poles were the most likely to buy airline tickets to European cities on the FRU platform in the summer of 2024. Among them, European capitals were mainly popular.

Florence, the famous Italian city, was the best-rated European city by readers of a U.S. travel magazine in 2024, scoring 90.55 out of 100 points. Funchal, in the Portuguese island of Madeira, ranked second with 89.82 points.

This statistic shows the number of international overnight visitors in the most popular European city destinations in 2016. London had the largest number of international overnight visitors in 2016 with 19.06 million.

In 2016, London had the second most international overnight visitors. In that same year, London ranked as the third leading city in terms of international visitor spending in the world. In 2016, some 858 thousand international overnight visitors to London came from New York, United States.

The number of international tourist arrivals in Europe rose significantly in 2023 compared to the previous year across all the most visited destinations in the region. Overall, France was the most visited country by inbound travelers in Europe in 2023. That year, France - which also topped the ranking of the countries with the highest number of international tourist arrivals worldwide - reported *** million international tourist arrivals, the highest figure recorded by the destination to date. Spain, Italy, and Turkey followed on the list in 2023. Europe is the most popular region for inbound tourism Europe is the region with the highest number of inbound tourism arrivals worldwide, with over *** million arrivals in 2023. Comparatively, there were nearly *** million international tourist arrivals in Asia and the Pacific, the second-most visited global region by inbound travelers that year. When breaking down the number of inbound arrivals in Europe by sub-region, Southern and Mediterranean countries reported the highest figures, both before and after the impact of COVID-19. Travel & Tourism Development Index France and Spain, among the most popular travel destinations in Europe in terms of inbound arrivals, were also among the leading countries in the Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI). The TTDI index measures factors and policies that support a sustainable and resilient development of travel and tourism worldwide. In 2023, Spain ranked first with a TTDI score of ****, followed by France and Germany.

According to a 2025 study, ***** and ***************** were the travel destinations that reported the highest change in the share of flight bookings from Europe between June and September 2025 over the previous year. *****, ********, and ******* followed in the ranking.

In 2015, Dubai was the city with the highest number of tourists staying at least one night per capita. That same year, international overnight visitor spending in Dubai reached 28.5 billion US dollars. The city, which is the largest and most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, was also one of the most expensive holiday destinations in the world in 2018. In 2016, 14.87 million people visited Dubai from abroad.

Europe and Asia: top destinations

According to the source, most of the 20 tourist cities with the highest number of visitor arrivals per capita were Asian or European cities. After Dubai, Amsterdam and Prague were the second and third cities with the greatest number of tourists spending at least one night per capita. With respectively, 2.7 and 2.5 visitors per capita, the two European cities were followed by another one: London. Singapore, ranked fifth with 2.1 visitors per capita, was the first Asian city in the list. Thus, New-York the first North American city of this ranking was 17th. It appears that Europe remains one of the most popular tourist destinations. Asia was also a very attractive destinations for international visitors with Hong-Kong being the leading city destination in 2017.

Focus on tourism in Europe

Since the nineties, the number of international tourist arrivals in Europe keeps increasing. France is the European country with the largest number of international visitors’ arrivals, while Spain and Italy are also two of the leading tourist destinations on the continent. Travel and tourism have an important contribution to GDP in Europe, reaching 781.6 billion US dollar and 2018 and expected to attain 991.4 billion in 2028.

The number of overseas tourist visits to London, United Kingdom continued to grow in 2023, following a sharp drop in 2021, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite the significant annual increase, inbound arrivals in the UK's capital remained below pre-pandemic levels, reaching ***** million in 2023. That year, inbound tourist visits to the UK totaled nearly ** million. London leading the way in Europe London’s contribution to inbound tourism in the United Kingdom is significant, with the UK’s capital accounting for over ** percent of international tourist arrivals in the country in 2023. This was more than other leading European destinations, such as Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. Those visiting the UK capital also made a significant contribution to the local economy, with expenditure of international visitors in London peaking in 2023, with inbound tourists spending over ** billion British pounds that year. However, this was not reflected in business travel spending in the city, which was nearly half a billion British pounds in 2023 than in 2019. London’s visitor attractions As the largest city in the UK, London is home to some of the country's most iconic visitor attractions. These range from government-sponsored museums, such as the British Museum, to the Tower of London and the ZSL London Zoo. In 2023, the ************** was the most visited tourist attraction in London. Overall, most sites have struggled to match the visitation rates recorded before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, however. For instance, attendance at the British Museum – the most visited free attraction in London in 2023 – declined by around ***** percent from 2019.

Madrid was the most visited city destination in Spain in 2023, having welcomed nearly ** million overnight visitors. The Catalonian capital followed second in the ranking that year, with roughly *** million tourists spending at least one night in the destination. How did Madrid rank in tourist visits and accommodation? In 2022, Madrid attracted over 4.5 million domestic and 4.6 million international tourists for stays exceeding one day, despite experiencing a more than 10 percent decrease compared to 2019 pre-pandemic levels. Furthermore, the Spanish capital has consistently ranked among the top ten European cities with the highest number of nights spent by tourists in paid accommodation, securing the 8th position that year. Which regions attracted the most international tourists? Spain's international tourism rebounded strongly from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, surpassing 100 million visitors in 2022. Catalonia led as the most visited region, attracting over **** million international tourists. The United Kingdom played a pivotal role as the primary source of international tourists, contributing over ** million travelers, followed by France with around ** million visitors.

Revenue in the Tour Operators industry in Europe is anticipated to grow at a compound annual rate of 13.5% to €69 billion over the five years through 2025. The decline in revenue for much of the period is predominantly due to the damage the COVID-19 outbreak inflicted on the travel sector over the two years through 2022. Customers were unable to travel abroad or domestically. Since restrictions were eased (at different intervals across different countries), holiday numbers have increased both domestically and internationally, which has seen an influx in bookings for European tour operators. Travel in Europe was 6.2% higher in 2024 than its pre-pandemic 2019 level, as recorded by the European Travel Commission, and many Europeans have sought advice and booked tours to travel to their dream destinations. Revenge travel was a trend tour operators became quickly accustomed to, with customers hungry for trips after being locked in for so long during the COVID-19 outbreak. Whilst high inflation in recent years has curbed demand with people’s pockets squeezed, savings during COVID-19 and people’s prioritisation of travel as their luxury purchase has kept bookings high. People are still booking lots of trips in 2025, but are looking for value for money. This is raising bookings in lesser frequented countries, which is encouraging tour operators to offer more packages in new countries to offer budget getaways for price sensitive customers. As a result, tour operator’s revenue is set to grow 0.3% in 2025. The weather continues to dictate seasonal demand, despite an uptick in off-season holidays, and destinations that tour operators target for trips, whilst geopolitical tensions have customers wanting the protection of booking through a travel operator. Revenue is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 4.6% over the five years through 2030 to €86.2 billion. Tour operators will continue to benefit from the growing travel industry, with people keen to travel for once-in-a-lifetime trips, city breaks, walking tours, culinary hotspots and beach retreats. Tour operators that give their customers more flexibility and the ability to book at the last minute will see significant demand as Europeans opt to travel at the last minute to reduce the risk of cancellations and airport strikes. Operators will face the challenge of adjusting packages, deals and holiday destinations to suit changing preferences. Sustainable travel tours are a growing market as travellers aim to travel more responsibly and lessen the environmental impact of tourism, which will encourage more operators to appeal to the environmentally conscious traveller.

Introducing the premier data set "Touristic Saturation," an indispensable resource for navigating the intricacies of European tourist activities. This cutting-edge dataset is meticulously structured to empower city planners, tourism businesses, marketers, and academic researchers with the insights needed to understand, manage, and leverage the dynamics of tourist attractions.

The core of this dataset lies in its innovative approach to quantifying tourist hotspots within a grid of H3, each in the resolution of 9, covering the entirety of European countries. This hexagonal grid system provides a high-resolution view of tourist distribution and facilitates a detailed analysis of tourist density and its impact on local environments and infrastructures.

Each hexagon in the dataset is assigned a value that represents the level of tourist attraction, with higher values indicating areas of greater appeal to tourists. This data is derived from a blend of sources, including social media check-ins, tourist footfall counts, counts of tourist points of interest, and local attraction ratings, ensuring a robust and multifaceted measure of tourist attraction.

This dataset is designed with practicality and accessibility in mind, allowing users to seamlessly integrate this data into their own systems for a variety of applications. From urban planning and congestion management to targeted marketing campaigns and academic research, this dataset provides a practical foundation for making informed decisions that can lead to more sustainable and profitable tourism practices.

Customers can effortlessly purchase and download the dataset for any European country of their interest.

By leveraging the "Touristic Saturation Dataset," stakeholders in the tourism industry and beyond can gain a competitive edge by identifying emerging trends, optimizing tourist experiences, and promoting sustainable growth within Europe's vibrant tourism sector.

Our Europe Zip Code Database offers comprehensive postal code data for spatial analysis, including postal and administrative areas for numerous European countries. This dataset contains accurate and up-to-date information on all administrative divisions, cities, and zip codes, making it an invaluable resource for various applications such as address capture and validation, map and visualization, reporting and business intelligence (BI), master data management, logistics and supply chain management, and sales and marketing. Our location data packages are available in various formats, including CSV, optimized for seamless integration with popular systems like Esri ArcGIS, Snowflake, QGIS, and more. Product features include fully and accurately geocoded data, multi-language support with address names in local and foreign languages, comprehensive city definitions, and the option to combine map data with UNLOCODE and IATA codes, time zones, and daylight saving times. Companies choose our location databases for their enterprise-grade service, reduction in integration time and cost by 30%, and weekly updates to ensure the highest quality.

Vacation and travel behavior of the West German population in 1988.

Topics: frequency of vacation in the last three years; destination areas; degree of organization of trip in the previous year; stay at place of vacation or tour; repeat trips to destination; type of vacation and psychological demands of a vacation; trip month; vacation duration; time of trip decision; sources of information; use of various tour operators and use of travel agent; influence of most important sources of information and advice on personal decision behavior regarding time, place, duration, choice of means of transport, price, lodging and type of meals; time of booking and payment; name of tour operator; services booked; form of organization of the planned trip and means of transport used; meal service booked; booking by respondent or fellow travelers; catalogs and pamphlets of tour operator consulted; using and taking guide books along; frequency of traffic jams at home and abroad in traveling by car; type of lodging as well as meals on vacation; accompanied on trip by someone from one´s household and age of this person; total travel budget as well as distribution of expenditures among vacation preparations, travel, lodging and meals as well as supplementary expenses; personal activities and occupations at place of vacation; types of sport conducted during the vacation; satisfaction with vacation; information on second or third vacation trips; preference up to now and future interest in various forms of vacation; preferred vacation regions at home and abroad; frequency of short vacation trips; interest in a vacation trip in 1989; interest in getting to know the social and political conditions in the country visited on vacation; interest in organized excursions and preferred degree of organization of trips to countries far away; attitude to Denmark as place of vacation; probability of a vacation trip to Southern Tyrol in various seasons; most important reasons for or against a vacation in Southern Tyrol in the spring; perception of environmental problems in the vacation area; perceived annoyance from environmental problems in the country visited on vacation; vacation areas in which the environment is still intact or the most damaged; personal trip to Berlin and perception of the promotion ´Berlin - Culture City of Europe 1988´; vacation stays on the Italian Adriatic; judgement on the Adriatic as a vacation area; interest in a vacation trip to this area; use of a travel agent as well as tourist office during the last three years; loyalty to travel agent and tour operator; knowledge of selected tour operators; assignment of selected services and characteristics to various kinds of places to book trips; membership in the ADAC {auto club}; conducting business trips in 1988; frequency of business air travel at home and abroad; planned business trips next year and planned use of airplane.

Miscellaneous: having a yard; living together with a partner; car possession; religious denomination; assessment of development of financial situation of household; frequency of reading selected magazines and daily newspapers.

The following questions were posed to non-travelers: year of last vacation travel; reason for not taking vacation trips.

Demography: age; sex; marital status; schooling; occupation; Occupation; net household income; sources of income (from DM 300); household size; household composition; respondent is head of household; characteristics of head of household.

Also encoded were: willingness of respondent to cooperate; interest in survey topic; willingness to participate in an equivalent re-interview; date of interview; length of interview; time of interview; city size; degree of urbanization.

Younger audiences dominate TikTok, a social video app that is also used extensively by influencers and travel bloggers. In April 2023, ********* was the city in Europe with the most TikTok views, amassing over *** billion views of videos tagged with the city's name. ****** was also extremely popular with TikTok users, totaling over **** billion views in April 2023, making the UK capital one of the most danceable cities in Europe. Other popular European cities tagged on the app were Paris, Istanbul, and Madrid.

All cities with a population > 1000 or seats of adm div (ca 80.000)Sources and ContributionsSources : GeoNames is aggregating over hundred different data sources. Ambassadors : GeoNames Ambassadors help in many countries. Wiki : A wiki allows to view the data and quickly fix error and add missing places. Donations and Sponsoring : Costs for running GeoNames are covered by donations and sponsoring.Enrichment:add country name

Average daily rate (ADR) refers to the average price a room is sold for - it is calculated as room revenue divided by rooms sold. In the second quarter of 2024, the nominal average daily rate for hotels in the United Kingdom's capital, London, stood at ***** British pounds, while the real average rate totaled *** British pounds.
Other important KPIs of the London hotel market As one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe, London’s hotel market is in a prime position for growth. Following the difficulties that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic presented to the tourism industries in both the UK and worldwide, hotel occupancy rates in London stabilized, and stood at over ** percent in the second quarter of 2024. Meanwhile, the nominal RevPAR in London hotels in the same quarter was around *** British pounds. London vs. the rest of the UK Compared to other towns and cities, London is by far the most visited UK destination by overseas visitors. Accordingly, it comes as no surprise that occupancy rates outside of London are consistently lower than in the capital. Similarly, the RevPAR in UK hotels outside of London was less than **** the figure in the capital in 2023.

The Louvre in Paris was the most visited museum in Europe in 2023. That year, the renowned institution, which also topped the ranking of the most visited museums worldwide, recorded around *** million visits. While attendance increased significantly over the previous year, it did not fully recover yet from the impact of COVID-19. Meanwhile, the Vatican Museums in the Vatican City and the British Museum in London followed in the ranking in 2023, with around *** million and *** million visits, respectively. London – the museum capital of Europe? Of the 20 most popular museums in Europe in 2023, *** were located in London. That year, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in South Kensington ranked as the most visited tourist attractions in the United Kingdom, ahead of the Crown Estate's Windsor Great Park, which was England's most visited paid attraction in 2023. What are the most popular city tourism destinations in Europe? London and Paris ranked as the leading city tourism destinations in Europe based on the number of bed nights in 2023, ahead of Istanbul, Berlin, and Rome. That year, the two cities also reported the highest number of inbound tourist arrivals among leading European destinations, each with over ** million arrivals.

In 2023, Lloret de Mar in Spain recorded the highest number of tourist arrivals per inhabitant among the selected European cities. The destination, a coastal town located south of Girona and northeast of Barcelona, had roughly 31 tourist arrivals per inhabitant in 2023. That year, Dubrovnik in Croatia and Venice in Italy followed on the list, with around 30 and 23 tourist arrivals per inhabitant, respectively.

The Croatian capital ranked as the worst city for overtourism or mass tourism in Europe in 2019, registering 36 tourists per inhabitant in that year. Meanwhile, the following three cities in the list recorded 21 tourists per inhabitant. Several European cities associated with overtourism have been forced to implement measures to tackle this problem.

What is “overtourism”?

‘Overtourism’ is a term coined by the travel and tourism industry to refer to problems arising from high numbers of tourists concentrated in a destination. Problems can range from environmental, such as the damage high tourism intensity has on the ecology of a destination, to the societal, in the impact that tourism has on local life and the economy.

Sustainable tourism growth

Europe is the most visited region in the world. Although governments recognize travel and tourism’s economic contribution, destinations have been forced to address dissatisfaction among locals and increased pressure on local resources. The United Nations has already developed a plan to achieve sustainable tourism goals worldwide within the next years, including engaging local populations in development and advancing urban infrastructure. Other local initiatives include attempts to reduce the number of large cruise ships at popular port destinations and encouraging visitors to stay in nearby destinations and to contribute to local businesses.

A 2025 study analyzed the cheapest cities to visit in Europe by calculating the average price of a series of products, services, and activities. Overall, Riga, in Latvia, ranked as the cheapest European travel destination, with an average daily cost of around *** British pounds. Vilnius, in Lithuania, followed in second place, with an average cost of roughly *** British pounds per day.