German tourists in Italy: 13.1 million trips, fewer overnight trips, and €8.8 billion spent

Four counts of one market

The Bank of Italy's Indagine sul turismo internazionale is the main Italian count of trips into the country. It interviews travellers at road, rail, air and sea crossings. Its unit is the trip, which it calls "viaggiatori", so one person who crosses twice counts twice. It counts residents of Germany, whatever their nationality. On that basis Germany supplied 13.1 million of the 92.2 million foreign trips into Italy in 2025, or 14.2%. Germany is also first in the Bank's ten-country spending table, which is ranked by 2025 spending.

The ISTAT and Eurostat accommodation series counts something else. It records each check-in at a hotel, a holiday rental business or a campsite that reports to ISTAT. A German family who camp on Lake Garda and then spend two nights in Verona generate two arrivals. Stays with friends, in owned holiday homes or in unregistered lets fall outside it. Eurostat's tables, updated 9 to 12 October 2026, show 15,229,247 arrivals and 71,048,482 nights by residents of Germany in Italian registered accommodation in 2025. Each check-in lasted about 4.7 nights, a figure we derived by dividing nights by arrivals.

The third count comes from the airports. ENAC, Italy's civil aviation authority, prints Germany's 2025 passenger traffic in three places in its Dati di traffico 2025 report. One passage gives 13.5 million passengers, up 5.8%. Another gives 13.5 million and 9% of all international passengers, fourth behind Spain, the UK and France. The section on EU traffic gives 13.6 million, up 4.2%, and 13.7% of traffic with EU countries, third behind Spain and France. The report's country table could not be read. The file we used is labelled version 0.7 and carries no printed date. We therefore quote 13.5 to 13.6 million and treat the growth rate as unsettled. Airport passengers count each leg in both directions, and Italians flying to Munich count as much as Germans flying to Naples.

The fourth count comes from Germany. The Federal Statistical Office, Destatis, reported on 17 August 2026 that residents of Germany made 105 million trips abroad in 2025 with at least one overnight stay, for private or business reasons. Italy took the largest share, 12.4%, ahead of Austria at 11.1%, Spain at 10.9% and France at 8.3%. Destatis published that share only; it gives no number of trips to Italy.

These four numbers belong side by side and never in one equation. Each counts a different thing: trips at the Italian border, check-ins at registered establishments, airport passengers, or overnight trips reported by German households. Dividing one by another measures nothing.

The accommodation series has a further problem. ISTAT's Storie di dati release of 17 July 2026 says the 2025 figure includes nights in private rentals run on a non-business basis for the first time. With them, Italy's total exceeds 535 million nights. Without them it would be 481 million. Eurostat's 2024 figures had not been restated on the new basis by its 12 October 2026 update, and its data carry no break flag. On the published figures German nights rose 8.9% and arrivals 8.4% in 2025. Neither is growth on a like-for-like basis, and no German figure without the private rentals has been published. Our Italy tourism record watch for 2026 covers the same break for the national total.

Fewer overnight trips, longer stays, more holiday spending

The Bank of Italy's German series for 2023 to 2025 shows a market that grew in value while fewer trips involved a night. German spending rose from €8,044 million in 2023 to €8,685 million in 2024 and €8,822 million in 2025. The 1.6% rise in 2025 was slower than for the other three large markets: the UK grew 7.6%, France 5.4% and the United States 3.0%. Germany still accounted for 15.6% of all foreign spending in Italy.

Overnight trips have now fallen twice. They were 10.5 million in 2023, 9.9 million in 2024 and 9.4 million in 2025. Over the same years total trips went from 12.5 million to 12.5 million to 13.1 million. The difference, which is our derivation and carries a margin of about 0.1 million either way, puts same-day trips at about 2.0 million in 2023, 2.6 million in 2024 and 3.7 million in 2025. The Bank publishes no German same-day figure and no explanation. Germans who cross into Italy for a day, from Bavaria or through Austria, are a plausible group, but the survey does not say who they were.

The Germans who stayed the night stayed longer. The average overnight trip rose from 6.2 nights in 2023 to 6.3 in 2024 and 6.5 in 2025. That is now slightly above the 6.4-night average for all foreign visitors, below Americans at 10.2 nights and above the UK at 5.3. Spending per night rose from €122.2 to €135.7 and then €140.2, an increase of 3.3% in the latest year by our calculation. The German figure is now 0.8% above the all-foreign average of €139.1, by our calculation. In 2023 it was below it. Spending by overnight visitors rose 0.7%, to €8,616 million.

The survey therefore implies about 61 million German nights in Italy in 2025, from €8,616 million of overnight spending at €140.2 a night. That figure is our derivation, and it includes nights with friends and family and in owned homes. It is a different measure from the registered-accommodation count, and the two should not be compared.

The split by purpose shows where the money went. Spending on trips for personal reasons rose 7.9%, to €8,119 million. Within that, holiday spending rose 12.3%, from €6,165 million to €6,926 million. Holidays took 78.5% of German spending in 2025, against 69.2% in 2023, both shares by our calculation. The Bank does not publish a German business row. Subtracting personal-trip spending from the total leaves €985 million in 2023, €1,162 million in 2024 and €703 million in 2025. That residual includes business travel and anything else outside personal motives. It is our arithmetic, and it fell about 39.5% in 2025.

Two derived figures give a sense of scale. Spending of €8,822 million over 13.1 million trips gives about €673 per trip. Overnight spending over 9.4 million overnight trips gives about €917. The UK equivalents are about €758 and €801. Both German figures are our calculations from rounded trip counts.

The Jubilee does not appear to have driven the German year. The Bank of Italy's report names Germany among the countries that contributed to growth in foreign arrivals in 2025. Its Jubilee section names the United States and Spain first, then Poland, the UK and France, and does not name Germany. The Winter Olympics in February 2026 were different. A Bank of Italy staff note of 28 August 2026 counted about 249,000 foreign visitors who came mainly for the Games, and Germany supplied the most, about 37,000 or 14.9%.

First by far in hotel and rental nights, with a smaller share

On registered nights Germany has no rival among foreign markets. In 2025 German guests logged 71.05 million nights. The United States logged 28.78 million, France 19.41 million, the UK 17.34 million, the Netherlands 13.14 million, Poland 13.03 million and Austria 11.35 million. German nights were about 2.5 times the American total and more than the next three markets combined, by our calculation.

The comparable years tell a slower story. Between 2019 and 2024, before the basis change, German nights rose from 58.70 million to 65.27 million, an increase of 11.2%. Nights by all foreign guests rose 15.1%. Germany's share of foreign nights was 26.6% in 2019, 27.0% in 2023 and 25.7% in 2024, a net slip over the five years. All of these shares are our calculations from Eurostat. The pandemic years distort the series. In 2021, when long-haul travel had almost stopped, Germans took 41.7% of foreign nights in Italy.

ISTAT's own release on 2024 needs a correction of wording. Its Statistica Today of 9 March 2026 puts Germany first with 65.3 million nights and refers to "la quota della Germania sul totale presenze nel 2024 (25,7%)", Germany's share of total nights. The 25.7% matches Germany's share of foreign nights, 65,270,290 out of 253,948,443. Of all nights, Italians included, Germany's share was about 14.0%. Both are ISTAT's numbers. The label in the release is the problem.

In 2025 the German share of foreign nights fell to 23.6%. That figure sits on the new basis, which adds private non-business rentals for every market. Foreign nights as a whole rose 18.8% as published, against 8.9% for Germans. The fall in share could reflect a smaller German use of the newly counted rentals, faster growth in other markets, or both. The data cannot tell them apart.

The average registered stay has barely moved. It was 4.74 nights per German check-in in 2019, 4.64 in 2024 and 4.67 in 2025, by our calculation. German guests stay longer per check-in than British guests, at about 3.7 nights, and Americans, at about 3.0. The data do not say why.

Getting there: road, rail and the air link

No official source counts how Germans travel to Italy. The Bank of Italy surveys at road, rail, air and sea crossings but publishes no breakdown by mode for any country. The Reiseanalyse, run by the research association FUR, says that 40.2% of all German holiday trips in 2025 were made by car and 46.9% by air. That split covers all destinations. We read it through secondary copies, a summary by Austria's national tourist office and the trade site tageskarte.io, and could not open FUR's own release.

The main road route crosses the Brenner Pass, and its counts are partial. Land Tirol's traffic report for 2024 and 2025 puts average traffic on the A13 at the Schönberg counter at 37,211 vehicles a day in 2025, down 4.3%. Heavy goods vehicles rose 2.3%, to 6,629 a day. Schönberg sits on the Austrian side, north of the pass, and the counter nearer the border was out of service in 2025. The report gives no split between cars and other light vehicles. On the Italian side, L'Adige reported on 15 May 2026 that the A22 motorway averaged more than 46,000 vehicles a day across its network in 2025. That is a press report of the operator's accounts for its whole network; it is not a border count.

Since January 2025 the Luegbrücke bridge on the A13 has carried one lane in each direction while it is rebuilt. South Tyrol's tourism body IDM says a second lane opens on about 180 days a year and that work should finish in 2030. The fall at Schönberg came in the first year of that regime. No source we found measures whether the roadworks moved German holiday traffic to other routes or other dates.

For the air link, ENAC's figures of 13.5 to 13.6 million passengers make Germany Italy's third-largest EU partner. ENAC publishes no Germany-Italy routes among its top EU routes, and we found no route-level passenger counts from ENAC or the airports' association Assaeroporti. ENIT, the national tourism agency, gave departure shares of 27% for Frankfurt, 22.4% for Munich and 12.2% for Düsseldorf in a release at ITB Berlin, without naming the data behind them. Ownership is also changing on the main German carrier's side. Lufthansa has held 41% of ITA Airways since January 2025 and exercised its option for a further 49% in June 2026, with closing expected in 2027; our analysis of the Lufthansa and ITA Airways deal covers what is and is not settled.

Entry is simple for German citizens. The Federal Foreign Office's Italy page, dated 2 November 2026, lists a passport or an identity card, including provisional versions and the children's passport, as valid for entry. The same page lists the usual risks, including pickpocketing, strikes, demonstrations and volcanic hazards at Vesuvius, Campi Flegrei, Etna and Stromboli.

Where Germans go: the lakes and South Tyrol

The Bank of Italy publishes no German breakdown by region, city or type of accommodation. Regional figures come from provincial and regional bodies, on different bases and for different years. They cannot be added up, and they do not sum to the national total.

South Tyrol is the most German part of Italy's tourism economy. The provincial statistics institute ASTAT counted 38,241,898 nights in 2025 in all accommodation, including non-commercial lets, on a provisional basis. Guests from Germany accounted for 17,178,534 of them, or 44.9%. That was more than guests from the rest of Italy, at 27.9%. The German share was 47.3% in 2024. ASTAT's basis is wider than the national registered-accommodation series. Our article on Dolomites tourism statistics sets out the three provincial counts and why no Dolomites-wide total exists.

Lake Garda's Veneto shore is the other German stronghold. The Verona Chamber of Commerce's report on 2025, with provisional data that include rentals from January 2025, puts German nights in the Garda destination at about 6.4 million. That is 49.9% of foreign nights. In the eight lakeside comuni alone the German share rises to 51.8%, about 5.9 million nights, followed by the Netherlands, the UK, Austria and Denmark. The report also gives German nights down 5.1% on 2024 in the destination and 5.6% in the lake comuni, while still about 8% above 2019. It warns that the rental change breaks comparability and does not say whether the 2024 base was restated, so the fall should be read with that caution. Our Lake Como and Lake Garda visitor statistics explain why the three Garda shores have no common count, and our Lake Garda travel guide covers the main bases.

Verona itself draws a different mix. The same report gives about 332,000 German nights in the city, only 15.0% of foreign nights, with the UK at 216,000 and the US at 191,000. Across Verona province Germans took 43.3% of foreign nights, about 6.8 million.

Further south the German presence is smaller but measurable. Toscana Promozione's provisional bulletin for 2025, which excludes tourist rentals, makes Germany the region's first foreign market by nights, at 4.6 million, ahead of the United States at 3.9 million. In Sicily, official 2024 figures put German nights at 1,179,355, second to France. ENIT's ITB release gives 2.2 million German nights for Sardinia and about 0.5 million for Calabria, without stating a source or year basis, and we have not used those as data.

2026: card data and one lake, no official count

There is no official Italian figure for German visitors in 2026. The Bank of Italy's monthly commentaries split foreign visitors only into EU and non-EU groups. Eurostat publishes no monthly German series. ISTAT publishes no nationality split for 2026 months. The national picture is that foreign nights in registered accommodation rose 5.2% in January to August 2026, on the new basis in both years, according to Eurostat. That covers every foreign market together and cannot be read as German.

The closest thing to a German figure is commercial. Nexi's tourism spending report, as reported by AziendaBanca on 15 October 2026, put card spending by German visitors at €2.42 billion in January to August 2026, up 10.5%. That put Germany second in size, behind the United States at €2.55 billion, which grew 7.3%. AziendaBanca describes the figures as Nexi transaction data and does not set out their coverage. We could not open the Nexi report. Card data are not comparable with the Bank of Italy survey, which ranks Germany first on total spending.

One area has a German figure for 2026, and it is press-only. The Austrian news site vienna.at, citing the Veneto regional statistics system, reported German nights on the Veneto shore of Lake Garda up 4.8% in the first half of 2026, under a headline saying German holidaymakers were staying away more often. We could not open the regional data behind it. The Ministry of Tourism's summer 2026 forecast gave Germany 6% of travellers in summer 2025, on a base it does not define, which matches none of the official shares above.

The claims that need a unit

Most of what circulates about Germans in Italy is accurate on its own terms and wrong once the unit is dropped. ENIT's release at ITB Berlin on 3 March 2026 described "more than 11 million German tourists" in January to September 2025, up 4.9%, spending €7.5 billion. The release names no source. The figures are similar in size to the Bank of Italy's trip counts, which include same-day visits. If they come from that survey, they count trips, including same-day visits.

The same release carried shares for German interests, such as beaches at 16.8% and culture at 15.5%, and the airport shares quoted above. None has a stated method. ISTAT's 25.7% is correct as a share of foreign nights and mislabelled as a share of all nights. The 8.9% rise in German registered nights is a published figure that reflects a change in coverage as well as any change in demand.

The two German rankings use different definitions. Destatis counts every trip with at least one night, for private or business reasons, and finds Italy first. The Reiseanalyse counts holidays of five days or more, and in its first results for 2025 lists Spain, Türkiye and Italy in that order, according to the secondary copies we read. Short trips across the Alps, business trips and visits to family weigh more in the first count than in the second.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers from Germany make up about half of foreign guests' nights on Garda's Veneto shore, and a majority in its eight lakeside comuni. In South Tyrol they account for 44.9% of all nights. On Garda's Veneto shore July and August together account for about 40% of all guests' nights. Drivers should check the Luegbrücke lane calendar before choosing a travel day over the Brenner. An identity card is enough to enter. The one thing most visitors miss is that Verona, a short drive from the lake, is far less German than the shore, at 15% of foreign nights. Our Lake Garda travel guide covers where to stay on each shore.

Tourism businesses and investors have a large market that is changing shape. German spending reached €8,822 million in 2025, holiday spending rose 12.3% and spending per night rose 3.3%. Trips with an overnight stay fell for a second year, and Germany's share of foreign registered nights slipped from 26.6% in 2019 to 25.7% in 2024. On Garda, German nights fell 5.1% in 2025 on a basis the local report warns is not fully comparable. For 2026 the only signals are card spending up 10.5% and a press-reported 4.8% rise on Garda in the first half. A rise in Bank of Italy overnight trips for 2026, or a restated 2024 accommodation series, would change this assessment.

Journalists and analysts should name the unit with every German figure, as the box above sets out. The safe citations are €8,822 million of spending, 13.1 million trips including same-day visits, 9.4 million overnight trips, 71.05 million registered nights with the 2025 basis caveat, and Destatis's 12.4% share. Do not call 13.1 million German tourists who stayed, do not call 25.7% a share of all nights, and do not call the 8.9% rise in registered nights growth. What this article adds is that the largest market shows the same split as the others: good annual counts in four incompatible units, a 2025 accommodation basis that cannot be compared with 2024, and no official count for the current year.