LUXEMBOURG / RankWire.AI / – In the initial six months of 2026, accommodation within the European Union registered a total of 1.321 billion overnight stays, marking a 1.7% increase from 1.299 billion nights during the same period in 2025. The Eurostat figures, covering January through June across the 27 member countries, include nights spent by both domestic and international tourists at commercial accommodation facilities.
Ireland experienced the most significant growth among EU nations, with overnight stays surging by 14.6% compared to the previous year. Malta followed with a 9.9% rise, while Slovakia reported a 5.9% growth. Conversely, nine countries saw a decline in overnight stays during this six-month span, with Cyprus experiencing the sharpest fall at 7.7%, and Romania at 6.7%. It is important to note that these figures reflect nights spent rather than visitor arrivals, tourism receipts, or travel expenditure.
International visitors accounted for 48.9% of all EU tourist accommodation nights in the first half of 2026. Malta held the highest proportion of foreign overnight stays, with 95.2% of its total, followed by Cyprus at 92.6%, and Luxembourg at 87.7%. These data include non-resident guests from other EU countries as well as visitors from outside the bloc, while domestic tourists comprised the remaining share of overnight stays across the EU.
Greater growth observed in foreign visitor nights
Compared to the first half of 2025, nights spent by international tourists grew by 2.5%, whereas nights by domestic visitors increased by only 0.9%. Consequently, the expansion in international overnight stays was nearly three times higher than that of domestic stays, with foreign visitors representing almost half of all tourism nights recorded throughout the bloc. These figures demonstrate how resident and non-resident travel contributed separately to the overall 1.7% rise in accommodation nights.
In several large domestic tourism markets, foreign guests accounted for a relatively small share of the total accommodation demand. For example, Germany reported an international visitor share of 18.5% during the first six months of 2026, Poland had 19.8%, and Romania stood at 23.0%. Each of these countries thus received less than a quarter of its tourism nights from non-resident visitors, emphasizing notable variation in the composition of accommodation demand across individual EU nations.
Hotels and short-term lodgings included in the data
The statistics on tourism accommodation encompass hotels and similar establishments, holiday lodgings, and other short-stay accommodations, along with camping sites, recreational vehicle parks, and trailer parks. Eurostat defines an overnight stay as each night a guest spends at a tourist accommodation facility. The data for the first half of the year exclude nights spent in non-rented accommodation, and this standardized measurement approach ensures that national figures can be combined to produce an aggregate total for tourism accommodation across the EU.
Earlier data for the first quarter of 2026 indicated 471.1 million tourism nights in the EU, reflecting a 3.4% increase compared to the same quarter of 2025. Specifically, January accounted for 143.5 million nights (up 3.2%), February had 154.4 million nights (up 3.4%), and March recorded 173.2 million nights (up 3.7%). The latest first-half results extend this reporting through June, culminating in a total of 1.321 billion tourism nights for the initial six months of 2026 across the EU.