Asian tourists in Italy: €5.1 billion, 3.5 million trips, and a Japan figure that belongs to Russia

Three counts of one region

The Bank of Italy's Indagine sul turismo internazionale is the main count of foreign travel into Italy. It interviews travellers at road, rail, air and sea crossings and counts residents of each country or area, whatever their nationality. Its unit is the trip. A traveller who enters twice counts twice, and same-day visits are included. Spending covers what visitors spend in Italy and excludes international fares. For Asia the survey publishes spending, trips, overnight trips, nights per trip and spending by purpose, for the region as a whole.

The second count is ISTAT's survey of registered accommodation, which Eurostat republishes by country of residence. It records check-ins and nights at hotels, holiday-rental businesses and campsites that report to ISTAT. Stays with friends, in owned homes or in unregistered lets fall outside it. Eurostat publishes rows for China, Japan and South Korea, among others. ISTAT's own release adds India. From 2025 the series includes private rentals run on a non-business basis, so 2025 cannot be compared with 2024.

The third count comes from airline ticketing. ENIT, Italy's national tourism agency, publishes airport arrivals from Asian markets using ForwardKeys booking data. These cover flights booked into Italian airports for a stated part of the year. They are a commercial dataset, published in ENIT presentations, and they are not border or hotel counts.

These three counts measure different things and cannot be combined. Dividing registered nights by survey trips, or comparing an airline figure for five months with a survey figure for a year, produces numbers that mean nothing.

The Bank of Italy's Asia row: more trips, shorter stays

The Bank's Asia series for 2023 to 2025 shows two years of fast growth. Spending rose from €3,678 million in 2023 to €4,303 million in 2024, up 17.0%, and to €5,055 million in 2025, up 17.5%. Asia's share of all foreign spending reached 8.9% in 2025. North America took 15.3%, with €8,652 million and growth of 3.7%. Oceania went the other way, falling 9.5% to €1,383 million.

The number of trips grew faster than spending. Asian trips were 2.5 million in 2023, 2.7 million in 2024 and 3.5 million in 2025. Trips with at least one night went from 2.2 million to 2.3 million to 3.0 million. The difference between the two, which is our derivation from rounded figures, puts Asian same-day trips at about 0.5 million in 2025. Most Asian trips to Italy involve a night: about 86% in 2025 by our calculation, against about 67% for all foreign trips.

Stays are long and getting shorter. The average Asian overnight trip lasted 12.5 nights in 2023, 11.5 in 2024 and 10.6 in 2025. That is among the longest in the Bank's tables, behind Oceania at 11.8 nights, Africa at 11.5 and Central and South America at 10.9, and well above North America at 9.8 and the all-foreign average of 6.4. All foreign stays shortened in 2025 too, by 3.7%. The Asian fall was 7.8%.

Spending per night moved the other way from the total. It rose from €135.1 in 2023 to €164.5 in 2024, then fell to €158.2 in 2025, a drop of 3.8% by our calculation. Asian visitors still spent 13.7% more per night than the all-foreign average of €139.1, also our calculation, but less than North Americans at €179.6 and Oceanians at €162.0. The Bank does not explain the fall. The survey shows a larger and changing group of visitors; it does not show whether the change came from different travellers, different destinations or different budgets.

Spending by overnight visitors and their spending per night together imply about 31.8 million Asian nights in Italy in 2025, against about 26.0 million in 2024. Both are our derivations. They include nights with friends and family and in owned homes, so they are a different measure from registered nights and should not be compared with them.

The split by purpose shows where the growth went. Spending on trips for personal reasons rose 24.3%, to €4,085 million. Within that, holiday spending rose 30.3%, from €2,404 million to €3,133 million. Holidays took about 62% of Asian spending in 2025, against about 56% in 2024, both shares by our calculation. The remainder, which includes business travel, was €970 million in 2025 against €1,015 million in 2024. The Bank does not publish that residual as a row; it is our subtraction.

Two derived figures give a sense of scale. Spending of €5,055 million over 3.5 million trips is about €1,444 per trip, down from about €1,594 in 2024. The all-foreign figure is about €615. Both are our calculations from rounded trip counts, and the Asian figure reflects the longer stays as much as the nightly spend.

For 2024 the Bank was more explicit about the cause. Its report on that year said the rise in spending from Asia was "in larga parte", largely, due to more arrivals, reinforced by the high spending per head typical of visitors from the area. Its report on 2025 names Asian travellers as the largest contributors to growth and does not give a reason.

What sits inside "Asia"

The Bank of Italy's tables do not define Asia. Its report on 2024 gives the best clue. In a paragraph that opens "Tra le entrate dall'Asia", among receipts from Asia, it says the weight of spending by travellers from the Persian Gulf countries had grown, especially from the United Arab Emirates, along with South Korea and China and Hong Kong, while spending by Israeli tourists had fallen sharply. Gulf spending is therefore part of the Bank's Asia line. Israel's placement is our inference from the same paragraph.

Other official bodies draw the line differently. The Foreign Ministry's statistical yearbook groups Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and the other Gulf states under "Mediterraneo e Medio Oriente", separate from Asia and Oceania. Readers comparing an Italian "Asia" figure across sources should check which countries it includes.

The tables have no country rows inside Asia. The Bank's spending and trip tables list ten countries ranked by 2025 spending, from Germany to Poland, then area totals. No Asian country is among the ten. There is no row for China, Japan, India, South Korea or the Middle East, and Australia appears only inside Oceania. Any figure for Chinese or Japanese spending in Italy in 2025 that claims a Bank of Italy basis comes from data the Bank has not published in these tables.

The placement matters for 2026. If Gulf travellers sit inside the Asia row, the fall in Middle Eastern visitors in spring 2026, described below, will weigh on the Asia figure the Bank publishes for 2026, alongside whatever happens to East and South Asian markets.

China, Japan, Korea and India in registered nights

The accommodation series is the only official Italian count that names Asian countries. Eurostat's tables, updated on 12 October 2026 from ISTAT data, show 4,106,271 nights by residents of China in Italian registered accommodation in 2024. South Korea logged 2,194,862 nights and Japan 1,524,377. ISTAT's release adds India, at 1,742,943. China's 2024 total was 1.6% of all foreign nights, Korea's 0.9%, India's 0.7% and Japan's 0.6%. Together, China, Japan and Korea accounted for about 3.1% of foreign nights, our calculation.

On the comparable basis the 2024 recovery was steep. Chinese nights rose 63.1% on 2023 and Japanese nights 35.1%. South Korean nights rose 19.5%. All three are our calculations from Eurostat. The recovery was uneven against the pre-pandemic year. China reached 76.7% of its 2019 total of 5,355,907 nights and Japan 59.9% of its 2,544,326. South Korea was already 14.0% above 2019. China's 2024 figure was still 18.0% above 2014, ISTAT's comparison year.

The 2025 figures exist but sit on the new basis. Eurostat gives 4,661,118 nights for China, 2,359,379 for South Korea and 1,632,887 for Japan. ISTAT's July 2026 release says the 2025 data include private non-business rentals for the first time, which lifts Italy's total from 481 million to more than 535 million nights. Eurostat has not restated 2024 and carries no break flag. The published rises for 2025 are therefore not like-for-like growth, and no figure without the private rentals has been published for any Asian country. Our Italy tourism record watch for 2026 covers the same break for the national total.

East Asian guests concentrate in upper-tier hotels. ISTAT's 2024 release puts 70.6% of Chinese nights and 65.5% of South Korean nights in 4- and 5-star hotels, against 34.2% for all foreign guests and 31.0% for all guests, Italians included. The figure for American guests is 64.4%. Business-run B&Bs and rentals took 14.5% of Chinese nights and 13.8% of Korean nights. ISTAT's text names Japan alongside the United States, Korea and China as markets with about two thirds of nights in 4- and 5-star hotels. Japan's row in that table could not be checked, for the reason in the next paragraphs.

ISTAT's release on 2024 contains a labelling error that changes the Japanese story. Its table of the top 30 foreign markets prints Japan with 6,822,174 nights in 2014 and 1,563,386 in 2024, a fall of 77.1%. The text repeats it: "Marcata la flessione delle presenze turistiche dal Giappone (–77,1% dal 2014)", a marked fall in nights from Japan. The same table prints Russia with 2,579,169 nights in 2014 and 1,524,377 in 2024.

Eurostat's country rows, built from the same ISTAT data, give those numbers the other way round. Russia logged 6,822,174 nights in 2014 and 1,563,386 in 2024. Japan logged 2,579,169 and 1,524,377. Eurostat's Japanese series sits between 1.9 and 2.6 million nights in every year from 2014 to 2019, while its Russian series sits between 4.0 and 6.8 million. The ISTAT table has swapped the two rows. Japanese nights fell 40.9% between 2014 and 2024, by our calculation, not 77.1%, and the drop of 5.3 million nights that ISTAT attributes to Japanese guests belongs to Russian guests.

The same table rotates three other rows. The numbers printed for Canada are Brazil's in Eurostat, those printed for Australia are Canada's, and those printed for Brazil are Australia's. Eurostat's Australia row shows a rise of 74.3% over the decade, not the 97.2% printed; the 97.2% matches Eurostat's Canada row. China and South Korea match Eurostat exactly. India has no Eurostat row, so its ISTAT figure cannot be cross-checked. Readers citing this table for any Asian or Pacific market should check the country against Eurostat first.

Visas: counted, but hard to read

Citizens of China and India need a Schengen short-stay visa to visit Italy; citizens of Japan and South Korea do not. Those visas are counted. The European Commission publishes short-stay visa statistics for every Schengen state by issuing consulate, in yearly files from 2009 to 2025, on a page dated 28 May 2026. Italy's Foreign Ministry publishes its own tables in its statistical yearbook, with visas by area, the top 20 countries and visas by purpose. The 2025 yearbook, with data for 2024, says in its foreword that visas issued by Italy's network rose 16%, mainly for tourism.

Italy's consulate-level figures for China and India are published in the Commission's spreadsheets and the yearbook's tables, which were not extracted for this article. The counts exist and are official; this article does not quote them. Press summaries of the Commission's 2025 data give Schengen-wide totals and say Italy received just over 1 million applications, but we have not checked those figures against the files.

Visa counts would not measure tourism directly in any case. A visa permits entry; it does not record whether the trip happened, how long it lasted or which Schengen country the holder spent most time in. They are a useful lead indicator for China and India and say nothing about Japan or Korea. Entry rules are also changing for visa-exempt Asian travellers, and our analysis of EES and ETIAS at Italy's borders sets out who the new systems cover.

Flights and the 2026 Gulf disruption

Direct air links between Italy and Asia grew in 2026, according to airline announcements. Air India resumed non-stop flights between Delhi and Rome Fiumicino on 25 March 2026, four times a week with a Boeing 787-8, according to its press release of 24 December 2025. Air China launched a Beijing to Venice service on 2 July 2026, four times a week, after a Beijing Daxing to Milan route in June, China Daily reported. The same report lists Air China services from Beijing and Shanghai to Milan and Rome, from Hangzhou to Rome and from Wenzhou to Milan, and notes 40 years since the first direct Beijing to Rome flight in 1986. ITA Airways flies daily between Fiumicino and Delhi and to Bangkok, according to a press report from AGI in April 2026 that we did not check against the airline. Its ownership is also changing, as our analysis of the Lufthansa and ITA Airways deal sets out.

No official series measures how many Asian visitors use those flights. ENAC and Assaeroporti publish passengers by airport and by route, and none of their tables splits passengers by country of residence. Our article on Italy's airport passenger traffic in 2025 covers what the airport data do and do not show. Many Asian travellers reach Italy through hubs in the Gulf or elsewhere in Europe, and route data record only the last leg.

That dependence on Gulf hubs matters because of what happened in spring 2026. The Bank of Italy's report of 26 June 2026 says arrivals from the Middle East had fallen sharply since the start of the conflict in the Persian Gulf. Using mobile-phone data, it estimated that presences of tourists from the area were about 35% lower in March 2026 than a year earlier, 60% lower in April and about 20% lower in May. Italpress headlined the same figures on 3 July 2026 as a collapse in presences "dal Golfo Persico", from the Persian Gulf; the Bank's report refers to the Middle East. The estimates count Middle Eastern visitors present in Italy. They do not measure the effect on East or South Asian travellers routed through the Gulf, and no source we found does.

The Bank's monthly commentaries do not split Asia out. For the three months to April 2026, spending by visitors from outside the EU grew 0.9% on a year earlier, against 7.9% for EU visitors, according to the April commentary published on 14 July 2026. The May commentary, published on 11 August 2026, gave non-EU growth of 0.4% against 4.1% for the EU over the three months to May. Both groupings include the United States, the United Kingdom and every Asian market, so they cannot be read as an Asian figure.

ENIT's China figures and other numbers that need a unit

Several figures for Asian markets circulate without their unit or scope. ENIT's release for the ITB China fair in Shanghai in May 2025 said about 176,000 Chinese visitors came to Italy in 2024, up 24.7%, with 2.4 million overnight stays, up 14.1%, and spending of €226.6 million, up 10.2%. It attributes them to ENIT's research department "based on Banca d'Italia data". The Bank's published tables contain no China row, so the figures cannot be checked against them. ISTAT's registered-accommodation count for the same year is 4,106,271 Chinese nights. The two use different methods and different populations, and neither disproves the other, but the gap shows why a source line matters.

The same ENIT release gave 67,680 airport arrivals from China between January and April 2025, up 2.2%, and forecast growth of 27% in airport arrivals for May to October 2025, both from ForwardKeys booking data. Partial-year airline figures of this kind are often repeated without the months. No outturn for the forecast has been published that we could find.

Finally, the rises of 63.1% for Chinese and 35.1% for Japanese nights in 2024 are correct, but they are not printed in ISTAT's release. They come from Eurostat's country rows, which carry ISTAT's data, and they describe registered nights on the pre-2025 basis. Cited with that source line, they are safe.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers from Asia reach Italy on more direct flights in 2026 than a year earlier, including Delhi to Rome and Beijing to Venice, while many routes still connect through Gulf or European hubs that were disrupted in spring 2026. Chinese and Indian citizens need a Schengen visa; Japanese and Korean citizens do not, though the EU's Entry/Exit System applies to them. Asian visitors who stay the night stay about 10.6 nights on average, far longer than most Europeans. The one thing most visitors miss is how strongly East Asian guests favour upper-tier hotels: about two thirds of their registered nights in 2024 were in 4- and 5-star properties, against a third for foreign guests overall.

Tourism businesses and investors have a region whose value is rising fast and whose shape is changing. Asian spending rose 17.5% in 2025 to €5,055 million and supplied about 30% of the growth in foreign spending. Trips rose 26.4%, stays shortened 7.8% and spending per night fell 3.8%, so total revenue rose while spending per trip (about €1,444 against about €1,594 in 2024, our calculation from rounded counts) and per night both fell. China's registered nights were still about a quarter below 2019 in 2024 and Japan's about 40% below, while Korea was above. The binding uncertainty is 2026: the Bank's mobile-phone estimates show Middle Eastern presences down by up to 60% in April, and non-EU spending growth slowed to 0.4% in the three months to May. A Bank of Italy Asia figure for 2026 above 2025, or a 2024 accommodation series restated on the new basis, would change this assessment.

Journalists and analysts should name the unit and the source with every Asian figure. The safe citations are in the box above, each with its unit and source. Do not call 3.5 million trips 3.5 million tourists, do not describe ISTAT's 77.1% as a Japanese decline, and do not present a Chinese spending figure for 2025 as a Bank of Italy statistic. What this article adds to the series is that the fastest-growing region in Italy's border survey is also the least visible below the regional total, and that one of the few official country tables for it prints two sets of rows under the wrong names.