This page documents exactly where each indicator comes from, how it's computed, and — importantly — what it doesn't measure. We aim for conservative, honest indicators over impressive-sounding but unreliable ones.
For each of the 27 EU member states, we track eight indicators across a five-year window (2019–2024). The indicators fall into three buckets — volume, pressure, and sustainability infrastructure — as described at the top of the dashboard.
Each indicator is a measured value from a national statistical office, not an estimate or a proxy guess. Where a derived metric is computed (such as length of stay, or tourism intensity), the formula is straightforward arithmetic on two measured quantities from the same source.
Tourism intensity is the total number of tourist nights spent in a country divided by the number of resident inhabitants. It's the single best indicator of how tourism relates to the society that hosts it.
Context: a tourism intensity of 1 means tourism adds the equivalent of one extra resident-night per inhabitant per year. Germany sits around 3. Hungary around 4. Malta exceeds 40 — every resident, on average, shares their country with forty tourist-nights every year. Croatia pushes 30. These are fundamentally different tourism economies, and comparing them without normalising for population would be misleading.
Intensity does not measure impact directly — that depends on how tourism is spatially distributed within the country, what kind of visitors arrive, and what infrastructure exists to absorb them. But as a first-order indicator of exposure, it's hard to beat.
Peak-month share is the percentage of annual nights spent that occur in the country's busiest month. A value of 13% means tourism is relatively flat across the year (close to 1/12 = 8.3% minimum). A value of 28% means more than a quarter of all annual tourism happens in one month.
Seasonality Gini is the Gini coefficient computed over the monthly distribution of nights. A Gini of 0 means perfectly equal distribution across twelve months; a Gini of 1 means all tourism occurs in a single month. In practice EU countries range from ~0.10 (Denmark, year-round business travel) to ~0.50 (Croatia, Greek islands — summer only).
Countries with high seasonality face structural challenges: peak-summer infrastructure stress, off-season unemployment, and more volatile sector revenue.
Every figure comes from one of two public sources: the Eurostat dissemination API, or the official Green Key International monthly xlsx registry. Both are freely available.
| Indicator | Source | Dataset code | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tourist arrivals | Eurostat | tour_occ_arnat | Annual |
| Nights spent | Eurostat | tour_occ_ninat | Annual |
| Monthly nights (seasonality) | Eurostat | tour_occ_nim | Monthly |
| Population | Eurostat | demo_gind | Annual |
| Sectoral GVA share (proxy) | Eurostat | nama_10_a64 | Annual |
| Accommodation capacity | Eurostat | tour_cap_nat | Annual |
| Sustainability certifications | Green Key International | monthly xlsx | Monthly |
Eurostat's dedicated Tourism Satellite Accounts dataset (tour_eco_int) is no longer publicly disseminated — it relied on voluntary submissions and had spotty coverage. As a substitute, this dashboard uses NACE Rev. 2 sector "I" (Accommodation and food service activities) as a share of total gross value added.
This metric overstates tourism's true share because it includes restaurants and cafés serving local residents.
It also understates tourism's full economic footprint because it excludes transport, travel agencies, attractions, and other tourism-adjacent activities.
But it's available consistently across all 27 EU states for every year, which makes cross-country and over-time comparisons meaningful. For a fuller picture, refer to national Tourism Satellite Accounts where available (most EU countries publish their own).
The dashboard groups EU-27 into five regions for comparison purposes:
Central & Eastern Europe (AT, BG, HR, CZ, HU, PL, RO, SK, SI) — nine countries.
Western Europe (BE, FR, DE, IE, LU, NL) — six countries. Larger economies with diversified tourism profiles.
Mediterranean (CY, GR, IT, MT, PT, ES) — six countries with high summer seasonality and beach-tourism dependence.
Nordics (DK, FI, SE) — three countries. Low seasonality, high per-capita spend patterns.
Baltics (EE, LV, LT) — three small countries with growing tourism sectors.
Regional aggregates use the median across member states (not the mean) — this avoids large countries dominating the comparison, and makes the regional value a more representative "typical" country in that group.
This is a structural snapshot, not a sustainability rating. Countries with high tourism intensity (like Croatia or Malta) are not "less sustainable" — they're simply more exposed to tourism flows, which creates both economic dependence and ecological pressure. A balanced reading of these indicators requires understanding the trade-offs each country has made.
Resident perceptions are deliberately omitted: there is no harmonised cross-country survey of how locals feel about tourism volume, and inserting non-comparable national surveys would mislead the eye.
Certification coverage is a leading indicator of intent, not of actual environmental performance. Green Key-certified properties commit to a set of operational practices; this dashboard reports the count, not whether those practices have been independently audited at each location.