The year 2023 has been one to remember for tourism in Italy. The results published by the Ministry of Tourism – based on data provided by ISTAT and, for the first time, supplemented by data from the “Alloggiati web” portal – clearly indicate a record year with over 134 million arrivals and 451 million overnight stays in accommodation facilities across the country.
As highlighted in the ministerial press release, these are the highest values ever recorded in tourism surveys, surpassing pre-pandemic levels of 2019: +3 million arrivals (+2.3%) and +14.5 million overnight stays (+3.3%). Compared to 2022, the growth in arrivals is 13.4% and that of overnight stays is 9.5%.
After the health crisis related to the pandemic, foreign tourists are also returning in strength, representing 52.4% of overnight stays in accommodation facilities in 2023, thus surpassing the number of domestic tourists.
The non-hotel sector grows more
An extraordinary result, therefore, for the Italian tourism sector as a whole, with no exception for the non-hotel segment: here arrivals and overnight stays grew by 16.9% and 11% respectively compared to 2022, marking an increase higher than that recorded in the hotel sector where arrivals increased by 11.5% and overnight stays by 8.1%.
Looking at the data related to non-hotel activities, territorially the Islands achieved the best performance in 2023 compared to 2022, with a 21% increase in arrivals (hotel activities stopped at +9.3%) and an 18.1% increase in overnight stays (+6.6% for hotel activities). Then there is the North-West with a 20.3% increase in arrivals and a 13.8% increase in overnight stays. North-East, Center, and South registered similar values with arrivals ranging between 15.5% and 16.6% and overnight stays between 9.1% and 10.9% more than in 2022.
The increase in overnight stays in the non-hotel sector is particularly significant in Lazio (31.5%, while in hotels the increase was 21.4%) and in Sicily (25.2% compared to the more modest increase in hotel stays of 11.3%), but also shows very high percentages in Campania and Lombardy (increases above 22%). In 2023, the hotel sector remains dominant in terms of the distribution of overnight stays by type of accommodation, hosting about 61% of the total overnight stays.
Only in three regions did the non-hotel sector account for more overnight stays than the hotel sector: Marche (53.8% against 46.2%), Tuscany (54.4% against 45.6%), and Veneto (57.4% against 42.6%).
