Tourism in Germany is booming: hotels, inns and guesthouses achieved record numbers of overnight stays in the first quarter. Now the industry is looking forward to the European Football Championship.
Germany is currently more popular as a tourist destination than ever before: in the first three months of the current year, accommodation providers recorded 88.9 million overnight stays. That is 8.4 percent more than a year earlier, said the Federal Statistical Office.
This means that the previous high from the first quarter of 2019, the year before the outbreak of the corona pandemic in Germany, was exceeded with 86.9 million overnight stays. “This is the highest value ever recorded for the first quarter of a year,” it said.
In the first quarter, the companies recorded an increase of 8.5 percent to 73.9 million in overnight stays from domestic guests.
The number of overnight stays by guests from abroad rose by 7.8 percent to 15.0 million. The information refers to accommodation establishments with at least ten sleeping accommodations or ten camping pitches.
Early Easter holidays
In March, too, with 35.6 million overnight stays from guests from home and abroad, the establishments exceeded the previous high for the month from 2018 by 2.5 million. Compared to March 2023, the numbers rose by 12.3 percent – a record.
The increase in March is probably also due to the fact that the Easter holidays had already started in March 2024 in all federal states except Schleswig-Holstein,” the statisticians explained the upward trend. As a result, the number of overnight stays by guests from Germany jumped compared to March 2023 up 13.2 percent to 30.1 million. There was an increase of 7.8 percent to 5.5 million.
The industry was hoping for fresh impetus from the European Football Championship in Germany, which is taking place from June 14th to July 14th. “The booking situation on match days is already consistently good to very good,” said the managing director of the German Tourism Association (DTV), Norbert Kunz, to the Reuters news agency in April about a survey of host cities.