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Top European Cities in 2017 are Revealed

All in all, 2017 was a positive year for the European tourism industry. According to the information provided by ECM (European Cities Marketing), the tourism in the region added 7.7% in 2017. This was mainly geared up by the growth in the number of the international visits by 9.2%, while the domestic market grew by only 5.2%. When it comes to the top European cities in terms of bed nights, the leaders are still the same and didn’t change compared to 2016. The top three cities are London, Paris, and Berlin.

When describing main source countries, Russia featured the biggest growth in 2017 (+27.3%). China and the US occupied ranks two and three respectively with the growth of 17.3% and 15.5%. Italy keeps providing fewer tourists, and last year was no exception with the decline of 3.4%. Experts name several reasons for an increased demand for European holidays, such as positive dynamics of overseas markets and more people willing to travel as a result, improved airline connectivity, and fewer concerns of people about possible terror attacks.

The European Cities Benchmarking Report presented by ECM contains detailed information about results of top European destinations and covers 65 main cities of the region. Together, they provided as many as 456.9 million bed nights to travelers in 2017. So, the top performing tourist cities of Europe in 2017 were London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Prague, Vienna, Munich, and Amsterdam. The list looks almost the same with the results of 2016 with only a few minor changes. For example, Madrid outperformed Barcelona because the tourist industry of the latter was seriously hit by the political unrest that followed the Catalan referendum. This is the only change in the top 10 cities.

London hotels enjoyed the highest number of bed nights and posted an increase of +7.6%. Hotels in Paris also performed well and sold 7.5% more bed nights last year. Berlin and Rome couldn’t reach similar results – their increase was only +0.3% and +2.4% respectively. In terms of the growth rate, Munich and Amsterdam hotels were the leaders with 11.7% and 11.2% more bed nights sold in 2017.

If we take into consideration international bed nights only, the result is almost the same. The only difference in Prague that reached the 4th place, taking over Barcelona. London and Paris were the most popular with international tourists (+7.9% and 11.1% respectively).

10.03.2018

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