Tourism, fewer Americans and more Canadians in Italy. Double the number of Italians travelling to Saudi Arabia
The Bank of Italy survey. Italy's share of tourism revenues falls from 3.6 to 3.4%
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Key points
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The spending of foreign tourists in Italy continues to grow: the pace has become less impetuous compared to 2023 (+16.8%) but 2024 also closed with a positive value: +5% in nominal terms and almost +4 in real terms. A trend that continues to grow in the first months of 2025.
Spending by Italian travellers abroad grew in turn by 4.5% in nominal terms and by 0.9% in real terms. Expenditure increased mainly in euro area countries.
These are the data from the Bank of Italy, according to which the surplus reached EUR 21.2 billion, equal to 1 per cent of GDP (as in 2019 and higher than the EU average). At the same time, however, Italy's share of tourism revenue fell from 3.6 per cent to 3.4 per cent, according to data from Unwto (the United Nations tourism agency).
Fewer Americans, more Canadians
.Revenues from some Eurozone countries, such as Germany (+8%) and Spain (+23.9%), to which almost half of the growth in Italian tourist arrivals is attributable, increased in particular. For traveller flows from North America, there was an opposite trend between Canadian (+27.9%) and US (-1.1%) tourists. However, the United States remains second in terms of total expenditure (EUR 6.412 billion) after Germany (EUR 8.685 billion) and last year the number of US travellers confirmed the 2023 level (4.1 million).
Among the revenue from Asia, the weight of spending by travellers from the Persian Gulf countries (especially the United Arab Emirates), South Korea and China and Hong Kong increased, while spending by Israeli tourists fell sharply.
