Malta is the second-best EU country at attracting tourists all year round, according to Eurostat data.
Figures published last month show that in 2021, most EU countries registered their highest tourist numbers in July and August.
Those numbers waned throughout the rest of the year, whereas Malta managed to remain a year-round destination.
The island came in a close second behind Finland.
“Tourism demand in some EU member states is particularly concentrated in the summer months of July and August,” Eurostat notes. “By contrast, while it does have a summer bias, Malta is a year-round destination with demand spread more evenly across the calendar.”
Eurostat is the official statistics office of the European Union and periodically issues publicly available statistics on the economy, population, wellbeing and social life of member states.
The study, which looked at economy and business trends, calculated tourism by the number of nights spent in tourist accommodation.
In 2021, 13.8 per cent of tourism in Malta was concentrated in July and 17.1 per cent in August, while 69 per cent was registered throughout the rest of the year.
This is more than what countries like Italy (51.7 per cent) and France (53.2 per cent) retained throughout the year and well above the EU average of 57 per cent.
Croatia registered the lowest retention rate throughout the year, registering more than two-thirds of its tourism in July and August.
The figures also show that in 2021, more than half of accommodation was booked in Valletta.
Eurostat highlights how in three countries – Luxembourg, Hungary and Malta – more than half of the nights spent in accommodation booked through Airbnb, Booking.com, Tripadvisor and Expedia Group were in the capital city.
By contrast, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain’s capital cities registered less than 10 per cent of booked accommodation nights.
Unsurprisingly, the figures also show that 71.8 per cent of accommodation booked in 2020 in the EU was internal tourism within the same country, as opposed to 54.8 per cent in 2019.
“In 2021, 364 million guest nights were spent in the EU in holiday rentals booked through one of these four platforms, well below the 512 million total in 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis,” the report notes.