Inbound tourism for July 2021 sees 149% increase over the same month last year

Inbound tourism for July 2021 saw a total of 121,311 visiting Malta, of which 105,942 visited for holiday purposes, while 5,099 visited for business purposes.

The figures come from a National Statistics Office report and show that the island saw inbound tourism grow by 148.9 per cent year-on-year, with just 48,743 individuals visiting the country in July 2020.

Indeed, in comments provided to The Malta Independent days ago, Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo described Malta’s tourism sector for the summer as “relatively satisfactory”, sharing that for August of this year, Malta welcomed around 200,000 tourists, equivalent to 85,000 more tourists than in 2020, and 138,758 fewer tourists than in 2019.

July 2021 saw Malta introduce fresh restrictions on travel, with unvaccinated travellers needing to quarantine irrespective of where they are coming from. This prompted Malta International Airport to sound the alarm that the country is lagging behind its competitor tourist markets due to such restrictions.

Whether Malta’s tourism market would have seen substantially higher August numbers without this restriction remains to be seen, however, after the rule change came in July, it was reported that Malta’s national carrier, Air Malta, lost €12 million in tourism revenue due to tourists cancelling holidays.

July 2021

The largest share of inbound tourists were aged between 25-44 (37.6 per cent), closely followed by the age bracket 0-24 (34.5 per cent).

French and Italian residents comprised 29.4 per cent of total inbound tourists.

The largest share of guest nights (81.8 per cent) was spent in rented accommodation establishments while the average length of stay of total inbound tourists stood at 9.2 nights.

Total tourist expenditure reached nearly €126.5 million and the average expenditure per night was estimated at €113.

January-July 2021

Inbound tourists for the first seven months of 2021 amounted to 260,998, a decrease of 37.7 per cent over the same period in 2020.

Total nights spent by inbound tourists decreased by 5.6 per cent, surpassing 2.6 million nights. Total tourism expenditure was estimated at €246.9 million, a decrease of 4.5 per cent when compared to the same period in the previous year. Total expenditure per capita stood at €946, increasing from €617 in the same period in 2020, mainly as a result of longer length of stays.