Tourism rebounds in June, but is still well below pre-pandemic levels

  • ECO News
  • 13 August 2021

The country's tourism activity gained some momentum in June but remained below pre-pandemic levels.

Tourism in Portugal continued to recover from 2020 in June, but still, the activity in the sector fell to around half of what were the pre-pandemic levels, according to data released by Statistics Portugal (INE) this Friday. There was also an increase in the prices of overnight stays in H1 compared to last year.

“The tourist accommodation sector registered 1.4 million guests and 3.4 million overnight stays in June 2021, which compares with 476.7 thousand guests and 1.0 million overnight stays in June 2020,” INE reports. However, compared to June 2019, there was a 50.1% drop in the number of guests and 52.6% in overnight stays.

The big difference, as expected, is foreign tourists. “Compared with June 2019, overnight stays of residents decreased by 7.6% and those spent by non-residents declined by 72.0%”. It is worth remembering that this was the month in which the United Kingdom removed Portugal from the Green list countries, having only returned in July, for those vaccinated.

The total revenue registered in the tourist accommodation establishments reached €212.7 million, which is also slightly less than June 2019.

Looking at the figures for the first six months of the year, “the number of overnight stays declined by 21.3%, a result from rates of change of +23.7% regarding residents and -50.8% concerning non-residents,” explains INE. Comparing to the same period of 2019, “overnight stays decreased by 73.4% (-42.3% in residents and -85.9% in non-residents).”

As for the regions, the Algarve and Lisbon dominated the choice of tourists in June. However, in the first half of this year, only the Azores (+28.2%) and Alentejo (+15.4%) recorded increases in the number of overnight stays, while in the other regions registered decreases.