Tourism in reverse gear: fewer nights in May 2025!
Tourism in reverse gear: fewer nights in May 2025!
In May 2025, accommodation companies in Germany had to accept a noticeable decline in the number of overnight stays. According to current surveys, they recorded around 47.5 million overnight stays. This decline of 2.6 percent compared to the previous year could be due to the later Pentecost holidays in some federal states, which in 2024 mostly took place in May and 2025 in June, such as busplaner.de reports.
The decline in the overnight stays of domestic guests is particularly striking, which fell by 3.3 percent to around 40 million. In contrast, the overnight stays of foreign guests enjoyed an easy increase of 1.5 percent, which corresponds to around 7.6 million overnight stays. These developments show that international tourism in Germany continues to have a positive trend, despite the overall economic decline in the accommodation sector.
overview of tourism
If you look at the further period from January to May 2025, the total number of overnight stays with 173 million suffered a decline of 0.8 percent compared to the previous year. While the domestic guests selected 144.3 million overnight stays by 0.9 percent less, overnight stays from abroad also decreased slightly by 0.3 percent to 28.7 million. This data comes from a survey that includes accommodation companies with at least ten sleeping facilities or parking spaces, so Deutschland-weniger-%C3%BCBertungen-im-mai-2025/" Class = "Source_2".Tourism not only has a significant influence on the economy in Germany, but also on employment. According to Statista , the sector contributes almost 9 percent to the gross domestic product. In 2023, international travelers generated considerable $ 37.4 billion in Germany and German travelers spent around $ 112 billion, which made us the third highest country for tourism expenditure, only behind the USA and China.
Current trends in travel behavior
An interesting aspect of the current market is the continued trend towards more overnight stays in hotels. They are still the most popular accommodation for domestic and foreign guests. The hotels are very popular in Germany, while around 48,200 accommodation companies are in operation, including around 12,200 hotels. Bavaria remains the most sought-after federal state, followed by North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg.
The journey by car remains the preferred method, followed by air travel, and more than half of the European travelers use the car to get to Germany. Even if railway and bus trips are less popular, an increase in demand for train trips, with around 108 million passengers that traveled with an ICE of Deutsche Bahn in 2023.
The figures published so far indicate that German tourism faces challenges. Nevertheless, there are also positive signs, especially in foreign travel that give hope. The detailed results for the monthly survey in tourism for May 2025 are expected to be published at the end of July 2025 and could provide further findings on the current trends in the German accommodation market.
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