In 2025, 31.1% of all overnight stays in tourist accommodations across the EU took place during the 2 busiest months; in all EU countries these were August and July. The seasonality of tourism is driven by environmental factors, such as climate conditions and geographical location, together with social and cultural influences, such as school holidays.
The seasonal pattern was most pronounced in Croatia, where 54.5% of overnight stays in 2025 were recorded in July and August, followed by Bulgaria (43.4%) and Greece (41.6%). Malta (21.9%), Germany (24.0%) and Finland (24.1%) were at the other end, with the lowest shares of the top 2 months in the overall performance.
Source dataset: tour_occ_nim
In August, the busiest month of 2025, there were 3.6 times more overnight stays across the EU than in January, the slowest month. Some countries stood out for their pronounced seasonality: in Croatia, overnight stays in August were 41.1 times those in January, while in Greece, the ratio was 20.5.
This article presents a handful of findings from the Statistics Explained article on seasonality in the tourist accommodation sector. Today, Eurostat publishes first set of harmonised European indicators on the sustainability of tourism, which also covers the topic of seasonality.