Ask a European where they spend their holidays and you might get a predictable answer: the beach in Greece, skiing in the Alps, a city break in Amsterdam. The stereotypes are not wrong, exactly, but they conceal a far more complex picture. European holiday patterns vary enormously by nationality, income, age and the decade — and the data collected by Eurostat and tourism researchers paints a portrait of leisure habits that is shifting faster than the clichés suggest.
The professor of European tourism habits
Professor Mariangela Franch, director of the Tourism and Events Research Centre at the University of Trento and one of Europe’s leading researchers on leisure behaviour, has spent twenty years tracking how Europeans actually use their holiday time. Her observation is immediate and counterintuitive: “The most important thing to understand about European holiday behaviour is that most Europeans don’t go abroad at all. The international travel that fills our media coverage represents a relatively affluent minority. The median European holiday is domestic, not international, and shorter than most people assume.”
Eurostat data supports this. In any given year, around 40% of EU citizens take at least one holiday trip involving an overnight stay away from home. Of those, roughly half stay within their own country. International travel within Europe is dominated by higher-income households, younger age groups and residents of smaller countries (where international travel is geographically and culturally closer).
The domestic holiday: Europe’s most common travel choice
Germans are the archetypal international European travellers — they collectively take more international holiday trips than any other EU nationality, with Spain, Austria and Italy as perennial favourites. But even in Germany, domestic tourism generates more overnight stays than outbound travel. For Poles, Romanians and Italians, domestic travel accounts for the large majority of holiday nights. The Italian beach holiday — on the Adriatic, the Tyrrhenian or the Mediterranean coasts — is one of Europe’s most durable mass tourism traditions, and the overwhelming majority of participants are Italian.
Where the beach holiday actually happens
The Mediterranean coast absorbs European beach tourism on a scale that makes it the world’s most visited holiday region: Spain, Greece, Croatia, Italy, Portugal and Turkey collectively hosted around 400 million tourist nights in peak season 2025. Spain’s Costa del Sol and Balearic Islands, Greece’s Cyclades and Crete, and Croatia’s Dalmatian coast have become so identified with European mass tourism that their economies, urban planning, water management and cultural life have been restructured around it. As examined in our heatwave adaptation analysis, climate change is beginning to alter the attractiveness of peak-season Mediterranean tourism — August temperatures in coastal Spain and Greece now regularly exceed what most tourists find comfortable — a shift that tourism researchers expect to accelerate and redistribute visitors toward shoulder seasons and more northerly destinations.
The changing profile: city breaks and experiences
“What we’ve seen over the last decade is a significant shift toward shorter, more frequent trips and away from the classic two-week annual holiday,” says Franch. “City breaks have grown substantially — Amsterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome — and there’s a clear trend toward experience-based travel: cooking courses, hiking, cultural festivals, wellness retreats. These segments are growing much faster than beach packages among younger and higher-educated travellers.” The economics of aviation have enabled this shift: low-cost carriers have made flying between European cities comparable in cost to train travel, opening up weekend tourism to cities that were previously too expensive for casual visits.
What this adds up to is a European holiday culture that is simultaneously more diverse, more experiential and — at its mass-market core — not as far from the traditional stereotypes as the trend stories suggest. The beach still wins.
