As the height of summer and the holiday season peaks this week, figures released by Eurostat yesterday show that the Maltese, rather impressively, are the European Union’s thirds-biggest spenders when it comes to summer vacations.

On an individual, per trip basis, Maltese holiday-makers spend the most per trip among all Europeans and are only outspent by the Luxembourgers and Austrians.

Figures published by  the EU’s statistical arm yesterday show that  per trip, tourists from Luxembourg spent the most (€769), followed by Austrian tourists (€641) and Maltese tourists (€633) on their holidays.

These figures compare with the EU average of €377 per person per trip, which means that Maltese, on average, spend close to twice as much as their European peers on holidays.

The Maltese also came out at the top of the daily tourism expenditure ranks, in thirds place, by spending an average of €128 per night per person on holidays.

Residents of Denmark (€162) spent the most, followed by Austrians (€132), Maltese (€128), Irish (€112), Luxembourg (€108) and Finland (€102) spent at least €100 per night on average during their tourism trips.

Overall, EU residents spent an estimated €467 billion on tourism trips in 2017. Of this, they spent 44 % on trips within their own country of residence and 56 % on trips abroad.

For each tourism trip, Europeans spent on average €377. Broken down by destination, they spent €223 on average on a domestic trip and €812 on an outbound trip. The average spent per night was €75 (€58 on average for each domestic tourism night and €97 a night on average for trips abroad).

German, French and British tourists were the biggest spenders in absolute terms. Their expenditure accounted for 58 % of all of the tourism expenditure of EU residents. This share is much more than the proportion of German, French and British tourists in the total number of trips (50 %) or overnight stays (53 %).

In eight of the 28 EU countries, residents spent more than half of the tourism expenditure during 2017 on domestic trips. The highest shares for domestic expenditure were observed for Romania (79 %) and Greece (76 %), followed by Spain (66 %), France and Portugal (both at 65 %) and Bulgaria and Italy (both at 64 %). For the majority of countries, however, most of the tourism expenditure occurred in foreign destinations with the residents of Luxembourg (99 %), Belgium (93 %) and Malta (92 %) having spent in outbound trips more than 90 % of their total tourism expenditure.

In all countries, most tourism expenditure occurred during longer trips of four or more nights (EU average: 72 %). Only in the case of Sweden (2016 data) was tourism expenditure for short trips of one to three nights higher than for long trips, then followed Finland where the share of expenditure for short trips was higher compared with other Member States, however still lower than for long trips.