Portugal is the 6th EU country with the most tourism businesses
Of the more than two million tourism-related businesses that existed in 2017 in the European Union, over 120,000 were Portuguese, says Eurostat.
Tourism was one of the first sectors to be affected by the Coronavirus crisis and is one of the most affected. Flight cancellations and the closing of borders have led to sharp drops in guests and, consequently, to losses of revenue for the sector’s companies. According to Eurostat, these companies were over two million in 2017. Portugal appears as the sixth member state with more companies in this area.
The most recent data from Eurostat shows that there were 2.3 million tourism companies in the European Union (EU) in 2017. Together they represented 3.7% of turnover of the non-financial business economy. Compared to other sectors, these enterprises “had a relatively strong seasonality, with peaks in turnover in the third quarter and a long-term upward trend up to the last quarter of 2019,” says Eurostat.
And of the over two million companies that existed three years ago, more than half (56%) were located in four member states: Italy (383,600), France (326,700), Spain (308,000) and Germany (263,400). Down to sixth place is Portugal, with 120,200 companies linked to the tourism sector, the equivalent of 5.2% of all existing companies in the EU.
In terms of jobs, in 2017 these companies employed 11.7 million people, which represented 9% of all employment in the non-financial business economy and 22% of the entire service sector, says Eurostat.
Germany (2.5 million), Italy (1.6 million) and Spain (1.5 million) accounted for almost half (48%) of all people employed in the tourism industry in the EU that year. The member states where these workers had most weight in the business economy were Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Croatia, Austria and Italy.
