In Italy never so many tourists as in 2023, a record year

More than 134 million arrivals and 451 million presences: this is the new record of Italian tourism certified by Istat data for the year 2023 (where arrivals means the number of customers who checked in tourist accommodation establishments in the reference period and presences means the number of nights spent). In fact, higher values have never been recorded since there have been statistical surveys on tourism. The numbers are very significant and see 2023 as many as 16 million more arrivals than 2022 (+13.4 percent) and more than 39 million presences (+9.5 percent); moreover, between 2019 (the last year before Covid) and 2023, arrivals in Italian tourist accommodations grew by 3 million (+2.3 percent compared to 2019), while tourist presences grew by 14.5 million (+3.3 percent). It can be seen that after the pandemic period (2020-2022), the foreign component of the clientele returns to dominate over the domestic one: in 2023, 52.4% of tourist presences are referred to customers not resident in Italy.

Arrivals and presences in the non-hotel sector grow by 16.9 percent and 11.0 percent compared to 2022, and show larger increases than those in the hotel sector (+11.5 percent and +8.1 percent). Latium and Lombardy are the regions that grow the most compared to 2022, given the sustained increase in tourist presences in the cities of Rome and Milan, while Veneto and Trentino - Alto Adige lead the ranking of the regions with the highest number of presences: with 72 and 56 million visitors, respectively.

The data were jointly released by theNational Institute of Statistics and the Ministry of Tourism and are the result of the activities of the Inter-Institutional Working Group on Tourism “Web Lodgers,” formed under the Memorandum of Understanding “Development and Enhancement of Statistical Information on Tourism” between the Ministry of Tourism and Istat. The Working Group enhanced - in support of the production of official statistics on tourism - the data in the information system “Alloggiati web,” i.e. of information acquired by the Ministry of the Interior for reasons of public safety, which is subsequently transmitted to the Ministry of Tourism in accordance with the Decree of the Minister of Finance in agreement with the Minister of the Interior of November 11, 2020. The statistics reported in the document were estimated by integrating data from Istat’s Official Survey “Movement of Customers in Accommodation Establishments” with those from the Ministry of the Interior’s “Accommodation Web” administrative archive and allowed for the production of advance regional estimates for the year 2023. A statistical report that for the first time takes into account all available databases with a collaboration also from the Ministry of the Interior.

Minister Santanchè spoke of a “historic record,” adding that “now, however, the challenge is not only to increase the number of presences, but rather to focus more and more on quality tourism, and therefore on tourism offers that can satisfy, in a sustainable way, every kind of need. This means managing flows and encouraging the birth of hotels, including luxury hotels, in order to raise the level of our offer so that it is not just hit and run but can offer tourists immersive experiences and attract more resources to our wonderful territories. Territories made up of many small villages that we need to know how to make a profit by favoring policies of deseasonalization and distribution of flows. Our industrial vision of the sector proves successful, judging by the data, and we will continue to work hard on this.”

Looking at the report, it can be seen that at the territorial level, the highest number of presences in 2023 is in the Northeast, where about 177 million presences are concentrated, accounting for 39.2 percent of the national total; followed by the Center (24 percent) and the Northwest (17.7 percent). The region with the highest number of presences is Veneto (15.9 percent of national presences), followed by Trentino-Alto Adige (12.4 percent), Tuscany, Lombardy and Latium (all just over 10 percent). The first region in the south of Italy is Campania, with 4.5 percent of national presences (just over 20 million presences).

Compared to 2019, i.e., pre-pandemic values, the regions where tourist presences have increased the most-with increases of more than 10 percent and significantly larger than the national average (3.3 percent)-are Lazio, Lombardy and Sicily. By contrast, only seven regions have not yet recovered to 2019 levels: Molise (-2%), Emilia-Romagna (-2.9%), Piedmont (-3.2%), Tuscany (-4.3%), Campania (-8.7%), Basilicata (-15.1%) and Calabria (-18.3%). On the rise is the non-hotel sector: compared to 2022, arrivals and presences in non-hotel establishments increase by 16.9 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The hotel sector, on the other hand, shows slightly smaller increases; in fact, arrivals are up by 11.5 percent and presences by 8.1 percent. At the territorial level, the increase in presences in the non-hotel sector is even 20 percent higher in Lazio (31.5 percent), Sicily (25.2 percent), Campania (22.8 percent) and Lombardy (22.3 percent). In Latium, moreover, the increase in presences has also reached values higher than +20% in the hotel sector.

In 2023, from the point of view of the distribution of presences by type of accommodation, the hotel sector hosted about 61 percent of total presences. Hotel accommodations even come to absorb more than 70 percent of regional tourist presences in Calabria, Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Valle d’Aosta and the two autonomous provinces of Trentino-Alto Adige. The non-hotel sector exceeds the hotel sector in terms of presences in only three regions: the Marches, Tuscany and Veneto.

Foreign tourism: after the pandemic and immediately post-pandemic interval, in 2023 the foreign component of the tourist clientele returns to predominance over the domestic one: in fact, 52.4 percent of the presences in accommodation establishments are represented by customers not resident in Italy. Thus, foreign tourists once again outnumber Italian tourists, with an even higher incidence than in 2019 (the share of foreign presences was 50.5 percent). Il Sole 24 Ore points out that in absolute numbers, however, 2019 still remains to be reached: in fact, 64.51 million tourists arrived from abroad compared to 57.25 in 2023. Italy is in fourth place in the ranking of international arrivals led by France with 100 million and Spain with 85.

The areas where foreign clientele strongly outnumber Italian ones are the province of Bolzano/Bozen (70.6 percent) and the regions of Veneto (69.3 percent), Lazio (64.2 percent) and Lombardy (62 percent). In contrast, in all regions of southern Italy, with the sole exception of Campania, the majority of the tourist clientele is represented by the domestic component. Oriented toward a distinctly domestic tourism are especially Molise, Abruzzo, Marche, Basilicata, Calabria, Emilia-Romagna and Puglia, where more than two out of three tourist presences (more than 69 percent) refer to Italian customers.

President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella also spoke on tourism at the Confcommercio National Assembly on June 13, where he spoke of the “indispensable contribution to the protection and development of the ’sense of Italy’” found in tourism: “its most formidable promotional element, directed as it is to developing attention and interest in our way of life, our products, our culture, our landscapes. It is the aspiration to be ”Italic,“ even for a little while, at least, that moves so many people from other countries in the large numbers of tourist flows to the peninsula and our islands. It is striking to record,” Mattarella stressed, “that Italy is the first country in the European Union in terms of the number of nights spent by tourists from other continents. And it does not escape anyone’s notice that tourism is of fundamental importance because of the transversality of the elements that accompany it, from transportation, to visits to places in the Italian cultural system, to high-end sectors, alongside those of hospitality. Creating and distributing wealth means corresponding to a social role.”

On the occasion, Confcommercio’s national president, Carlo Sangalli, also highlighted how, despite stagnant productivity, Italy has recovered the points lost in the difficult 2020 also and above all thanks to tourism, which is performing extraordinarily well with 26 billion in net tourism balance for last year “and this year we will do even better.”

In Italy never so many tourists as in 2023, a record year

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