In 2017, the number of nights spent in tourist accommodation establishments in the European Union (EU) is expected to have reached more than 3.2 billion, up by 5.1 percent compared with 2016, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, shows.
In the EU, the number of nights spent in tourist accommodation by non-residents grew faster (+6.9%) between 2016 and 2017 than those spent by residents (+3.5 percent). Almost every EU Member State recorded an increase in the number of tourism nights spent by non-residents, including in Romania where non-residents’ overnight stays increased by 8.9 percent and those of residents increased by 5.5 percent.
In absolute figures, Spain (307 million nights, or 19 percent of the total of nights spent by non-residents in the EU) recorded the highest number of nights spent by non-residents in tourist accommodation establishments.
Latvia recorded the largest increases in terms of number of nights spent in tourist accommodation in 2017 – 12 percent, followed by Slovenia (+11.3 percent) and Croatia (+10.6 percent), Portugal (+8 percent), the Czech Republic (+7.7 percent) and Cyprus (+7.3 percent). In contrast, the only slight fall was registered in Luxembourg (-1 percent, equivalent to 28 thousand nights).
The most recent data from the National Institute of Statistics (INS) shows that in Romania the overnight stays registered in the first 11 months of 2017 in tourist facilities increased by 6.2 percent compared to the similar period of 2016 to 25.325 million, while arrivals increased by 10.4 percent to 11.272 million.