Data collected in 2025
Planned article update: 2028
Highlights
Tourism generated an estimated €517 billion direct gross value added in 2022, or 3.6% of the total gross value added in the EU economy.
The highest share of tourism in a country’s total gross value added was observed in Croatia (10.5%).
In 2023, tourism direct gross value added was 9% higher than before the pandemic but its relative share in total gross value added still had to catch up with pre-pandemic levels (due to sector having been hit harder than the rest of the economy).
This article introduces the concept of tourism satellite accounts (TSA) as an internationally acknowledged tool to assess the economic importance of tourism and presents some main statistical findings. Even though TSA have been successfully compiled over the last 25 years in some countries, the statistics presented here are labelled as “experimental” because the EU level data are aggregated based on country components with a different level of development and harmonisation.
Eurostat has been publishing data and analyses on TSA since 2010, the most recent was in released in March 2026. This article summarises the findings of that paper, as a quick introduction for non-expert readers, in the context of the inclusion of “Tourism Satellite Accounts on Europe” in Eurostat’s set of experimental statistics. The reference year is 2022 which was generally the most recent available reference year at the time of data collection in 2025.
What are tourism satellite accounts?
Traditional European tourism statistics, typically collected from service providers in the tourism sector or from households, focus mainly on measuring tourism flows in a country or between countries (number of tourists, number of nights spent, etc.). While these statistics are an essential element for understanding or monitoring tourism in Europe, there is a strong user need to understand the economic dimension of tourism and the sector’s impact on the economy and on the labour market. TSA rely on the concepts of national accounts and can be seen as a ‘satellite’ to the national accounts system, identifying the tourism sector and quantifying its macro-economic importance.
Domestic tourism was dominant in the EU in 2022
TSA consists of ten tables, of which the first four relate to the demand side, or how much visitors spend. When looking at internal tourism expenditure (expenditure by overnight tourists and same-day visitors in the economy), domestic tourism was the dominant flow. In 2022, visitors making trips in their own country of residence (or the domestic part of trips abroad) accounted for 61% of internal tourism expenditure, while inbound tourism (trips made by foreigners) accounted for the remaining 39%. Not surprisingly, there are big differences across the EU. The importance of domestic tourism in internal tourism expenditure ranged from more than 92% in Romania to 12% or less in Croatia, Luxembourg and Malta (2015 data for Malta) (see Figure 1 and Table 1). Table 1 summarises information from TSA Table 4 on internal tourism consumption. Internal tourism consumption comprises domestic and inbound tourism expenditure (for the acquisition of consumption goods and services for and during tourism trips) as well as other components such as imputed rent of owned holiday homes.
Source: Eurostat, Data collection on TSA 2025
Source: Eurostat, Data collection on TSA 2025
Same-day visit generated nearly one third of domestic tourism expenditure
Tourism does not only include trips outside one’s usual environment spending one or more nights away from home, but also comprises same-day visits for tourism purposes. While overnight tourism was the dominant component (77%) in the internal tourism expenditure in 2022, same-day visitors also make a substantial contribution (23%) (see Figure 2). Not surprisingly, the share of same-day visits in inbound tourism expenditure is relatively low (13%), but their share in domestic tourism expenditure is quite high (30%).
Source: Eurostat, Data collection on TSA 2025
Tourism accounted for 3.6% of the total gross value added in the EU economy in 2022
Table 6 of the TSA system consolidates the demand side and the supply side and makes it possible to estimate economic aggregates such as gross value added. Figure 3 shows the share of tourism direct gross value added in the total gross value added in the entire economy, giving an indication of macro-economic importance of tourism. On average for the EU, tourism accounted for 3.6% of the gross value added created in the EU during 2022, which was well below the pre-pandemic level (estimated at 4.5% for 2019) and indicating the EU tourism sector was still recovering from the pandemic in 2022. Big variation can be observed across the EU: from 10.5% in Croatia to 0.8% in Luxembourg.
In absolute value, tourism direct gross value added amounted to €517 billion. The main contributors to this estimate at EU level, were the tourism sector from Germany (€92 billion), France (€82 billion) and Spain (€75 billion) (note that for Italy no comparable data for 2022 is available). It is worth pointing out that gross value added is not only created via trips spent in a country, but for instance also by resident service providers (such as airlines or tour operators) that provide tourism services to residents visiting destinations abroad. It is important to specify that the results presented here refer to the direct effects, namely the part of – for instance – gross value added generated by tourism industries and other industries of the economy that directly serve visitors in response to internal tourism consumption. Tourism Satellite Accounts don’t include indirect effects generated by the additional demand for goods and services necessary to satisfy visitor demand for goods and services (for instance restaurants have to buy and prepare more food, hotels need more housekeeping supplies and public services, aquatic centres consume more cleaning supplies and more water, transport businesses must buy more petrol, fuel and spare parts, etc.). This means that the impact of tourism on the economy is not fully reflected in the Tourism Satellite Account tables, the impact including indirect effects must be measured and analysed using other means such as input-output models.
Source: Eurostat, Data collection on TSA 2025
Tourism faced a tougher recovery from the pandemic that the rest of the economy
As mentioned in the introduction to this article, the main reference year for the data was 2022. 16 of the 26 participating countries were also able to share data for 2023 for a number of indicators. While this subset of countries is not representative for the EU as a whole, the data offers some insights in the place of tourism in the economy in 2023, the year in which the tourism sector had mostly recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic that hit the sector hard in 2020 and subsequent years.
Estimates for internal tourism consumption for the year 2023 are available for 16 countries (see Figure 4). In 2022, internal tourism consumption was still below the 2019 pre-pandemic level in 5 of the 16 countries, but in 2023 internal tourism consumption exceeded the values for 2019 in all countries for which data is available (except Bulgaria, but that country had reached the pre-pandemic level in 2022 but noted a small decline in 2023). For all 16 countries taken together, internal tourism consumption was 20% higher in 2023 compared with 2019, while in 2022 this was only 4%.
Source: Eurostat, Data collection on TSA 2025
In 2023, tourism direct gross value added also exceeded the pre-pandemic level of 2019 in absolute terms. However, in relative terms, the tourism direct share in the economies’ total gross value added was still below the pre-pandemic level, which indicates that the tourism sector faced a tougher path in recovering from the pandemic than other sectors or than the entire economy. This doesn’t come as a surprise as the tourism sector was among the hardest hit parts of the economy (in the first year of the pandemic, 2020, gross value added dropped by 3% in the economy, while tourism direct gross value added dropped by more than 30% in that first year of the pandemic). For the countries where TSA estimates are available for 2023, the level of tourism direct gross value added was, on aggregate, 9.4% higher than in 2019 (see Figure 5), while in 2022 the value was at the same level as in 2019. For the same group of countries, total gross value added in the economy had grown by 23% between 2019 and 2023 (and by 15% between 2019 and 2022).
Source: Eurostat, Data collection on TSA 2025
Source data for tables and graphs
Data sources
The data used to compile this article comes from a voluntary submission of available TSA data by European countries. Every 3 years, Eurostat organises such voluntary submission, using a common template covering the headline figures for TSA. In the most recent exercise (2025), 26 countries participated, of which 24 were EU Member States. It was suggested to countries to apply 2022 as a common reference year (but many countries also provided data for 2023, allowing some insights on the economic importance of tourism after the COVID-19 pandemic). Not all countries provided all indicators included in the template.
To compile TSA at national level, countries use a wide range of different sources, the main ones include primary tourism statistics, business statistics supply and use tables and input-output tables.
More information on data sources for TSA, and on the coverage of the data collection, is available in Chapter 3, Annex I and Annex II of the Statistical Report TSA Tourism Satellite Accounts in Europe 2023 edition.
The reference methodology for TSA, is the internationally accepted 2008 Tourism Satellite Account: Recommended Methodological Framework (TSA:RMF 2008), that was jointly developed by the United Nations Statistics Division, Eurostat, the OECD and UN Tourism.
Context
The EU is a major tourist destination, with 6 European countries among the world's top 10 destinations for holidaymakers, according to UN Tourism [1] data. Tourism is an important activity in the EU which contributes to employment and economic growth, as well as to the development of rural, peripheral or less-developed areas. Tourism is estimated to account for 4.5% to the EU's gross value added. These characteristics drive the demand for reliable and harmonised statistics on this activity, as well as within the wider context of regional policy and sustainable development policy areas.