Tourism, in Italy fewer Americans and more Canadians. Italians traveling to Saudi Arabia double

Spending by 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 also in the first months of 2025.

Spending by Italian travellers abroad also increased by 4.5% in nominal terms and by 0.9% in real terms. Spending increased especially in euro area countries.

According to data from the Bank of Italy, the surplus reached 21.2 billion euros, equal to 1% of GDP (as in 2019 and higher than the EU average). At the same time, however, according to data from UNWTO (the United Nations agency for tourism), Italy's market share of tourism revenues fell from 3.6 to 3.4 percent.

Revenues from some euro area countries increased the most, such as Germany (+8%) and Spain (+23.9%), which accounted for almost half of the growth in Italian tourism revenues. For travel flows from North America, an opposite trend was recorded among Canadian (+27.9%) and American tourists (-1.1%). The United States still remains second in total spending (6.412 billion euros) after Germany (8.685 billion) and last year the number of US travelers confirmed the level of 2023 (4.1 million).

Among the revenues from Asia , the weight of spending by travellers from the Persian Gulf countries (especially the United Arab Emirates), South Korea, China and Hong Kong has increased, while spending by Israeli tourists has sharply decreased.