No Place Like Home

Let us begin our exploration with France. Available high-value datasets indicate that between 2012 and 2023, 90% of leisure trips taken by French tourists happened within French borders.

These were the most popular domestic destinations.

The other 10% of trips originating in France had other countries as their destination.

When travelling abroad, the favourite destinations of French tourists were Spain, Italy and Germany. A much smaller share of trips was to non-European countries. You can explore the data by clicking on the arrows.

Comparing destinations to each other can be hard on a map, so let us switch to a different type of chart, called a Sankey diagram. You can learn more about it in this story's visualisation note.

How does France compare to all the other Member States? Let us see all the international trips that had a Member State as their origin…

…and now let us see all the Member States as separate charts.

We can now turn to line graphs that compare domestic and international trips per year. The first thing you might notice is that the COVID-19 pandemic affected each European country differently.

For example, here are a few Member States where, at the beginning of the pandemic, international trips decreased and domestic travel increased.

And these are a few countries where both domestic and international trips decreased.

By 2023, most European countries had returned to their pre-pandemic travel levels, but some changed. For example, between 2020 and 2023, there was a sharp increase in international trips from Ireland.

Lithuania is the opposite – even if international travel has recovered in recent years, it has not reached pre-pandemic levels.