Executive Summary
Tourism ministries and destination organisations frequently announce success through record arrivals, overnight stays and nominal revenue. These figures are useful, but they are not a complete performance assessment.
More arrivals can coincide with shorter stays, lower local spending per visitor, higher economic leakage, growing infrastructure pressure, declining resident acceptance and increased environmental cost. Revenue can also rise partly because prices increased, not because the destination created more real economic value.
Tourism has changed. A visitor who once booked a hotel for seven or ten nights may now arrive on a low-cost flight, spend a few hours recording content, purchase little locally and continue to another destination. There is nothing inherently wrong with that traveller. The statistical problem is that an arrival can still carry considerable political weight even when its local value and destination impact are very different.
Governments should continue publishing arrivals and overnight stays, but they should place them inside a broader tourism performance statement covering real expenditure, length of stay, local value retention, seasonality, resident benefit, resource pressure and emissions.
Tourism is not successful merely because more people arrived. It is successful when more value remains after they leave — without weakening the destination that received them.
The press release usually begins with the same sentence
Another record year.
More tourists arrived. More overnight stays were registered. Revenue reached a new high. The numbers are presented as evidence that tourism policy is working.
Across the European Union, nearly 3.1 billion nights were recorded in tourist accommodation during 2025, an increase of 2.2% compared with 2024. [1] Croatia reported 21.8 million tourist arrivals and 110.1 million overnight stays in 2025. Arrivals increased by 2%, while nights increased by 1%. [2]
These are legitimate statistics. The problem begins when they are treated as a complete verdict.
The Croatian result already illustrates why a second question is necessary: if arrivals grew faster than overnight stays, what happened to the depth and duration of each visit? At the same time, Croatia’s national consumer price index increased by an annual average of 3.7% in 2025, while the harmonised index increased by 4.4%. Prices in restaurants and hotels increased by 8.2% on an annual-average CPI basis. [3]
This does not prove that Croatian tourism performed poorly. It proves that a record in nominal revenue, arrivals or nights cannot interpret itself.
A serious performance report must ask:
- How much did tourism revenue grow after inflation?
- Did visitors stay longer or shorter?
- How much did they spend per day and per night?
- How much of that spending remained in local businesses and wages?
- Did growth occur outside the peak season or intensify pressure during it?
- What happened to water demand, waste, congestion, emissions and housing pressure?
- Did residents experience greater benefit, greater cost, or both?
Without those questions, governments are reporting tourism volume — not tourism performance.
One arrival can describe completely different forms of tourism
Consider two simplified visitor journeys.
The first visitor books a locally operated hotel for seven to ten nights. They eat in local restaurants, join guided excursions, purchase products from local shops, visit several communities and contribute across a network of tourism and non-tourism businesses.
The second visitor arrives on a low-cost connection, visits a famous location for several hours, records photographs and video, buys two bottles of water and continues to another destination.
This is a field scenario, not a judgement of individual travellers and not a universal description of modern tourism. Budget travel can be inclusive, meaningful and locally beneficial. Long-stay tourism can also create serious impacts.
Counting the border crossing tells us that tourism occurred. It does not tell us what tourism produced.
Tourism has evolved faster than its political scoreboards
The tourism economy is being reshaped by low-cost aviation, short breaks, cruise and excursion traffic, digital booking platforms, flexible work, social-media-driven itineraries and travellers combining several destinations within one journey.
Destinations therefore receive a more complex mix of:
- overnight visitors and same-day visitors;
- longer holidays and rapid multi-city trips;
- direct local bookings and platform-mediated purchases;
- high-spending and low-spending segments;
- travel outside the peak season and intense short-duration peaks;
- slower ground-based journeys and carbon-intensive air itineraries.
A national arrival total compresses this complexity into one politically convenient number.
The OECD has explicitly argued that the rebound in tourism demand reinforces the need to measure tourism success differently. It identifies average expenditure, length of stay, seasonality and employment alongside water, energy, waste, emissions, transport mode, local satisfaction and cultural impacts as important components of sustainable tourism measurement. [4]
The international statistical architecture has also moved beyond volume. The UN Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism, endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission in 2024, connects tourism’s economic, environmental and social dimensions at national and subnational levels. [5]
In other words, the technical direction is already clear. The public narrative has not caught up.
The five statistical illusions of arrival-led tourism reporting
Nominal revenue can disguise weak real growth
If tourism receipts increase by 5% while the relevant price level increases by a similar amount, the destination has not necessarily generated 5% more real value.
Inflation does not make revenue irrelevant. It changes how revenue must be interpreted. [6]
Public reporting should show:
- nominal tourism receipts;
- inflation-adjusted receipts at constant prices;
- real spending per visitor;
- real spending per visitor-night; and
- where possible, a tourism-specific price adjustment rather than reliance only on the general consumer price index.
The European Commission's EU Tourism Dashboard now allows users to examine some monetary indicators at current and constant prices. That is exactly the distinction public tourism communication should make visible.
More arrivals can hide shorter and shallower visits
An increase in arrivals alongside slower growth in overnight stays can indicate that visits are becoming shorter, although the pattern must be examined by market, accommodation type and destination.
Shorter visits are not automatically undesirable. They become a policy concern when they create high mobility and infrastructure pressure while generating limited local value.
Arrivals should therefore be reported together with:
- average length of stay;
- share of same-day and overnight visitors;
- expenditure per day and per trip;
- repeat visitation; and
- distribution of visitor activity across the destination.
Total spending can hide economic leakage
A destination may report strong visitor expenditure while a significant share leaves through foreign-owned booking platforms, international transport providers, imported goods or externally owned tourism businesses.
The relevant policy question is not only how much visitors spent. It is how much value remained.
A local value-retention measure should examine the share of tourism expenditure supporting:
- local accommodation and tourism operators;
- local food producers and suppliers;
- local guides, craftspeople and cultural organisations;
- local wages and secure employment; and
- municipal services and destination reinvestment.
Gross spending can be impressive while the local value chain remains weak.
Annual totals can conceal seasonal overload
Annual averages flatten the exact periods when residents, ecosystems and infrastructure experience tourism pressure.
A destination can appear manageable across twelve months while exceeding road, water, waste or public-space capacity during several peak weeks. The annual number does not disappear; it simply fails to show when the burden occurred.
Eurostat's developing tourism-sustainability indicators include tourism intensity in the peak month, comparing overnight stays with the resident population. In the most tourism-intensive European regions, the indicator approaches 30 tourist nights per resident during the peak month. [7]
This is why Green Path developed the Seasonal Ecological Debt Index (SEDI): to examine tourism and mobility, waste and water, energy and emissions, land and biodiversity, socio-cultural load, and governance during the periods when destination systems are under greatest pressure.
Growth can reduce the quality of the product being sold
Tourism depends on the quality of place.
If growth produces congestion, degraded public space, housing pressure, resident frustration, ecosystem damage or an increasingly standardised visitor experience, the destination may be consuming its own competitive advantage.
In such cases, more visitors today can weaken the conditions required for tourism tomorrow.
That cost rarely appears in an arrival announcement.
Why sustainability is still rarely the first headline
The explanation is partly political and partly statistical.
Arrivals are visible. They are comparable with the previous year. They fit easily into a press release. A ministry can say that 2% more people arrived and the statement appears objective, positive and complete.
Sustainability performance is harder.
It requires multiple institutions to connect tourism data with transport, energy, water, waste, housing, labour, biodiversity and resident information. It may reveal trade-offs. It may show that one region improved while another deteriorated. It may require a government to acknowledge missing data or an indicator moving in the wrong direction.
But difficulty is not a justification for incomplete governance.
If a ministry has enough confidence to describe a year as record-breaking, it should also have enough evidence to explain what the record delivered and what it cost.
The correct opening question should not always be:
How many more tourists did we manage to attract?
It should be:
How much measurable economic, social and environmental value did tourism create — and was that value greater than the pressure required to produce it?
A better national tourism performance statement
Governments do not need to stop publishing arrival numbers. They need to stop publishing them alone.
Every annual or seasonal tourism announcement should contain four reporting layers.
Volume
- arrivals;
- overnight stays;
- average length of stay;
- same-day visitor estimates;
- accommodation occupancy; and
- geographic and seasonal distribution.
Economic quality
- nominal and real tourism receipts;
- real spending per visitor and per night;
- local value-retention rate;
- tourism wages, job quality and employment stability;
- share of procurement from local suppliers; and
- public revenue reinvested into destination management.
Destination and resident impact
- resident sentiment and tourism acceptance;
- congestion and peak mobility pressure;
- housing and short-term-rental pressure;
- visitor concentration at sensitive sites;
- distribution of benefits between regions and communities; and
- accessibility of tourism opportunities and public space.
Environmental performance
- emissions per visitor-trip and visitor-night;
- mode of arrival and movement within the destination;
- water and energy demand per visitor-night;
- waste generation and recycling performance;
- pressure on protected areas and biodiversity; and
- seasonal ecological debt and infrastructure capacity.
The European Commission’s Tourism Dashboard already demonstrates that public tourism monitoring can extend across green, digital and socio-economic pillars. Its 2025 edition included 35 indicators and descriptors, with selected municipal-level data introduced for the first time. [6]
The barrier is therefore no longer the absence of a policy direction. It is the willingness to make broader performance measures as politically visible as arrival records.
What a transparent press release could look like
Instead of stating only:
We welcomed 2% more tourists and achieved record revenue.
A ministry could report:
Tourist arrivals increased by 2% and overnight stays by 1%. Average length of stay changed by X%. Nominal receipts increased by X%, while inflation-adjusted receipts increased by Y%. Real expenditure per visitor-night changed by Z%. The share of spending retained in local value chains was X%. Peak-season mobility pressure increased in two coastal regions, while off-season nights grew in four regions. Water use per visitor-night declined, emissions per visitor-trip remained unchanged, and resident tourism acceptance improved in three of five surveyed destinations.
That statement is longer.
It is also far more useful.
It allows businesses, residents, investors, municipalities and policymakers to understand whether the tourism system is becoming stronger — not merely larger.
Green Path practical course of action
Green Path proposes a six-step transition from volume reporting to measured tourism performance.
Step 1 — Publish volume, value and impact together
No arrival or revenue announcement should be published without contextual indicators covering visit quality, real economic value and destination pressure.
Step 2 — Separate nominal growth from real growth
Show current-price and constant-price revenue. State the deflator used, its limitations and whether a tourism-specific price index is available.
Step 3 — Segment the visitor economy
Differentiate overnight, same-day, cruise, organised, independent, domestic and international visitors. Examine transport mode, stay duration, expenditure pattern and spatial concentration.
Step 4 — Measure what remains locally
Develop a local value-retention account connecting visitor expenditure with local ownership, procurement, wages, taxation and destination reinvestment.
Step 5 — Connect growth to capacity
Define thresholds for mobility, water, waste, energy, housing and sensitive ecosystems. A growth target without a capacity test is not a strategy; it is an assumption.
Step 6 — Publish confidence and data gaps
Every dashboard should identify whether an indicator is complete, provisional, proxy-based or unavailable. Missing evidence should be visible rather than concealed behind a confident headline.
This is where the GRAIL Government layer and SEDI can work together: governance indicators explain whether institutions can manage tourism transparently, while seasonal pressure indicators show what is happening on the ground.
The purpose is not to judge destinations for receiving tourists.
It is to help them understand which forms of tourism create durable public benefit and which forms create pressure without sufficient return.
Conclusion: count what remains
More tourists can be good news.
But it is not automatically evidence of better tourism policy, a stronger local economy or a more sustainable destination.
Tourism has evolved. The same arrival total can now represent profoundly different patterns of time, spending, mobility and impact. Public statistics must evolve with it.
The next generation of tourism reporting should not replace arrivals with a new fashionable score. It should connect volume with value, value with distribution, and distribution with environmental and social capacity.
Because the most important tourism question is not how many people arrived.
It is what remained for the destination, its residents and its environment after they left.
Author
Vedran Kovač, MBA
Founder, Green Path Alliance
Vedran Kovač is the founder of Green Path Alliance and the developer of the GRAIL Framework. His research focuses on sustainable tourism governance, destination resilience and practical measurement methodologies that help governments and organisations move from volume-based to value-based tourism performance assessment.
Tags
Industry and Institutional Sources
- 1.Eurostat. Another record year for EU tourism in 2025. 4 March 2026.
- 2.Government of the Republic of Croatia. Turista u 2025. u Hrvatskoj 21,8 milijuna, a noćenja prvi puta iznad 110 milijuna. 7 January 2026.
- 3.Croatian Bureau of Statistics. Consumer Price Indices, December 2025. 15 January 2026.
- 4.OECD. OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2024 — Building the evidence base for sustainable tourism policies. 2024.
- 5.UN Tourism. Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism. Endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission, 2024.
- 6.European Commission. Updated facts and figures on EU tourism available now — EU Tourism Dashboard. 15 December 2025.
- 7.Eurostat. Tourism sustainability indicators — available material and methodology.
- 8.Eurostat. Information on tourism data.
Related Green Path Resources
- Green Path Alliance. Introducing SEDI: Measuring the Seasonal Ecological Debt of Tourism Destinations.
- Green Path Alliance. SEDI Index Split, Croatia 2025: What the First SEDI Assessment Tells Us.
- Green Path Alliance. GRAIL Framework — Sustainability Governance and Assessment Methodology.