Tourism in Europe during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic
The travel industry was one of the heaviest impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which led to severe reductions in the number of international tourists worldwide. The pandemic also affected domestic travel as stay-at-home orders were enacted to control the spread of the virus. In Europe, this can be seen in the large drop in European domestic tourism expenditure in 2020, which fell by 48 percent to a low of roughly 631 billion U.S. dollars.The numbers of international tourists in Europe showed similar trends. At the beginning of the pandemic, the number of international tourist arrivals in Europe fell by 97 percent for all regions. By the beginning of 2021, tourist arrivals had still not nearly recovered to their previous levels, with Western and Northern Europe reporting the greatest reduction over the previous year. Europeans also were not traveling much during the pandemic, with European outbound travel forecast to drop by over 60 percent for all regions in 2020.
