Luxembourg's Residents Spend Nearly All Their Holiday Nights Abroad

Counting nights rather than people

The table behind this page counts nights: every night a resident of a Member State spent away from home on a trip lasting at least one night, taken for personal reasons. Personal reasons cover holidays, visits to friends and relatives and other private travel, as opposed to business trips. Each night is filed under the country of the trip's main destination, and that destination can be the traveller's own country.

Among its destinations, the table includes three totals for every reporting country: nights spent at home, nights spent abroad and nights spent anywhere in the world. The share used on this page is the second divided by the third. The table does not publish that ratio; Silver Data Lab derives it from the two counts, and it is labelled as derived wherever it appears.

In 2025 the residents of the 27 Member States together spent about 5.70 billion nights on such trips, and about 2.63 billion of them outside their own country. That gives the EU share of 46.2%, up from 42.3% in 2019, the last year before the pandemic. Because the EU share pools every night of every resident, it leans towards the countries whose residents record the most nights. By Silver Data Lab's derivation from the same counts, Germany, France and Spain, the three with the most nights, account for 52.5% of all the nights in the 2025 total, and German residents alone for 32.4% of the nights spent abroad.

Small countries at the top

Luxembourg leads at 97.1%. Its residents spent 19.8 million nights on personal trips in 2025 and only about 0.6 million of them inside the Grand Duchy. Malta follows at 85.5% and Belgium at 85.4%, then Denmark at 76.3%, Slovenia and the Netherlands at 75.3% each, and Cyprus at 72.1%.

A plausible reading, which the table itself cannot test, is that the size of a country limits how far its residents can travel without crossing a border. A trip of a few hours from Luxembourg or most of Belgium ends in France, Germany or the Netherlands, and an island the size of Malta offers a resident little that is new for a week away. Cyprus is an island state too, and so is Ireland, which comes just after it. None of this is measured here: the data record where nights were spent, not why. Denmark has joined the leaders since 2019, when its share was 55.4%, and the section on change below shows which of its counts moved.

Fewer than one night in four abroad

Greece has the lowest share, 12.7%, or roughly one night in eight. Of the 73.3 million nights its residents spent on personal trips in 2025, 64.0 million were spent in Greece. Romania follows at 17.3%, Spain at 22.4% and France at 23.0%: four Member States where fewer than one night in four was spent abroad. Portugal and Italy, both at 25.4%, come next.

One possible reading is that most of these countries offer their own residents long coastlines, islands or mountains within reach. That is an interpretation rather than a finding: the table offers no measure of what a home destination has to offer, and income, the cost of travel and habits passed down within families could each contribute to the pattern.

How the shares changed since 2019

Compared at one decimal place, the share rose in 17 Member States between 2019 and 2025, fell in 9 and stayed at 35.2% in Poland. Denmark gained by far the most, 20.9 points, rising from 55.4% to 76.3%: its residents' nights at home fell from 55.0 million to 24.1 million while their nights abroad grew from 68.5 million to 77.6 million. The Netherlands came next, from 66.0% to 75.3%, then Czechia, from 30.9% to 40.1%. Spain moved from 18.2% to 22.4%. Estonia and Greece changed by two tenths of a point or less.

The largest fall was Lithuania's, from 64.8% to 57.4%, followed by Italy's, from 30.7% to 25.4%, Cyprus's, from 75.6% to 72.1%, and Belgium's, from 88.8% to 85.4%, so that Belgium now sits behind Malta. Luxembourg slipped from 99.4% to 97.1%. Each of these changes is a difference between two derived shares, so it can come from nights abroad, from nights at home or from both; the counts quoted for Denmark show both moving in the direction that raises its share.

Where the nights abroad go

Of the 2.63 billion nights EU residents spent outside their own country in 2025, 64.8% were spent in another Member State and the rest outside the Union, against 62.9% in 2019. That split is derived from the table's own destination totals.

The companion study on tourism intensity looks at the same activity from the other side: the nights that each country hosts per inhabitant, which is where foreign visitors land rather than where residents go. Read together, the two measure different things, and a country can rank high on one and low on the other.