This emerges from the provisional data from Statistics Austria from today, Friday. According to the information, 24.8 million of the 37 million overnight bookings in the first half of the summer season were for guests from abroad and 12.2 million, i.e. a third, for holidaymakers from Germany. Compared to the last pandemic-free year 2019, this means an increase in domestic guests of 5.2 percent or around 600,000 overnight stays; among foreign guests, 8.8 percent or 2.4 million overnight stays were still short of the pre-crisis level.
Compared to the three-month period of 2021, there was strong growth in both groups of holidaymakers – only a year ago 15.2 million guests came from abroad, and 10.7 million from Germany.
Only slightly below pre-crisis value
“After two difficult summers for tourism, the first half of the 2022 summer season was again particularly busy,” said Statistics Austria Director General Tobias Thomas. In July, the pre-crisis value was “only slightly below” this year with 17.83 million overnight stays with a minus of 4.9 percent.
The majority of foreign holidaymakers came from the European Union. An analysis of the countries of origin of guests from abroad in the summer season so far shows that 84.8 percent of all overnight stays by foreigners were due to tourists from the EU, according to the statisticians. In the same period of 2019, it was 78.1 percent.
Although overnight bookings from Asia increased again compared to the Corona years 2020 and 2021, measured in terms of all overnight stays by guests from abroad, they were still 3.7 percentage points below the pre-crisis level in 2019.
In the calendar year 2022 so far, things are not looking as rosy as in the summer interim balance. From January to July, hotels, guesthouses and holiday apartments booked 80.4 million overnight stays, 15.5 percent below the pre-crisis level in the same period in 2019 (95.10 million). However, the comparison periods in the lockdown-plagued corona years 2021 (29.67 million) and 2020 (63.82 million) were significantly exceeded.
Source: Nachrichten
