The tourism sector continued to recover in 2022 and Portugal was the seventh country in the European Union (EU) with the most overnight stays on online platforms such as Airbnb, Booking, Expedia Group or TripAdvisor, a total of 25.2 million. Still below the 31 million they had in the year before the pandemic, according to Eurostat data.

The analysis in regional terms, of the data, shows that it was the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon that recorded the most overnight stays in this type of accommodation (7.5 million), followed by the Algarve (7.4 million), the North ( 5.2 million), the Center (2 million) and the autonomous regions of Madeira (1.5 million) and the Azores (826,000).


Most popular destinations

The most popular European regions for short-term accommodation booked last year via these types of digital platforms were Jadranska Hrvatska in Croatia (25.6 million nights), the Spanish region of Andalusia (20.3 million), the French zone of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (18.8 million) and also Catalonia, (14.8 million).

In total last year, guests booked 547 million nights of short-term accommodation in the EU via online platforms. The numbers show that there has been a robust recovery compared to 2021 (364 million nights) and that overnight stays even surpassed the levels of 2019 (512 million nights).

In 2022, the biggest increases in overnight stays compared to 2019 were registered in Sweden (+33 percent), France (+31 percent) and Belgium (+23 percent). By contrast, 14 EU member states were still behind 2019 levels. The most significant reductions were recorded in the Czech Republic (-36 percent), Hungary (-27 percent), Ireland and Estonia (both -23 percent).

This sector surpassed pre-Covid numbers in the final stretch of last year, being 10 percent above the values recorded in the fourth quarter of 2019 (88 million overnight stays). In the last quarter of 2022, 97 million nights were booked in short-term tourist accommodation in the European Union (EU), booked through online platforms. These figures also reflect an increase of 25 percent compared to the same period in 2021.