Portugal received a record 11.4 million foreign tourists in 2016, an increase of 12.7% compared to the previous year, which had already set a record, the National Institute of Statistics announced on Wednesday.
Last year, revenues of the Portuguese hotel sector increased by 17%, reaching 2.9 billion euros, INE said in a press release on preliminary data on tourism activity.
Portuguese hotels recorded a total of 53.5 million overnight stays in 2016, an increase of 9.6%, including 38.3 million for foreigners (+11.4%).
Britons remain the best customers for Portuguese hotels, with 9.15 million nights, ahead of Germans, Spaniards and French. These numbers do not include the number of tourists hosted through peer-to-peer accommodation platforms such as Airbnb, which alone numbered 912,000 visitors in 2015.
Portugal, with a population of 10.3 million, has made tourism one of the main drivers of its economy. The European Commission commented on Monday in its winter economic forecasts that “the outlook for the Portuguese economy has improved after a strong performance in the second half of 2016, mainly driven by tourism.”
The Portuguese economy slowed slightly in its pace of growth in 2016, with gross domestic product increasing by 1.4% after a 1.6% increase the previous year, the National Statistics Office said on Tuesday in a preliminary estimate. But this result remains higher than the expectations of the Socialist government, which expected economic growth of 1.2% last year.
Daily/AFP
