Puglia tourism statistics 2025: 22.7 million nights, +10% like for like, and why ISTAT's +26.7% is not like for like

Which Puglia number to cite

Four official figures for Puglia circulate, and they measure two different things. Two leave private rentals out. Two include them.

ISTAT's release of 9 March 2026 gives Puglia 17,894,361 nights in 2024, up 6.4% on 2023 and 3.8% of the Italian total. That count covers hotels and registered extra-hotel establishments. ISTAT states that private short lets run outside a business are not part of the extra-hotel category. It shows them separately, for 92 of Italy's 107 provinces, and we found no Puglia figure for them in the release. Of the 2024 total, 11,862,805 nights were by residents of Italy and 6,031,556 by visitors from abroad. Eurostat carries the same numbers and adds 5,105,838 arrivals.

The Osservatorio Turistico of the Regione Puglia gave a larger 2024 figure. Its summary of January 2025 reports "over 20.7 million" nights, up 9.7%, and 5.9 million arrivals. The document does not define its scope. The 2025 regional count points to the answer. Take Pugliapromozione's 22,689,935 nights for 2025 and its stated growth of 10%, and the implied 2024 base is between 20.5 and 20.7 million nights (our calculation, allowing for the rounded percentage). The Osservatorio's "over 20.7 million" sits at the top of that range, so it is consistent with that base. The regional count included rentals in 2024 too. The BIT presentation reports rental nights up 25% and rental arrivals up 28% on 2024, rates it could compute only from a 2024 rental figure. Its methodological note says only that ISTAT's data leave these stays out.

The 2025 figures agree. Eurostat's 22,678,354 nights and Pugliapromozione's 22,689,935 differ by 0.05%. The regional figure is provisional, with data to 29 January 2026 covering 92% of the reporting sample by establishments and beds. Eurostat's figure is the definitive one ISTAT transmits. It reproduces ISTAT's reported growth exactly: 22,678,354 against 17,894,361 is +26.73% (our calculation), the rate Italpress attributed to ISTAT. We could not open ISTAT's own 2025 regional table.

So the +26.7% compares a 2025 count with rentals against a 2024 count without them. Eurostat flags no break in its data. The Region's like-for-like +10% is the closer measure of growth. On that rate, about 2.0 to 2.2 million of the 4,783,993 extra nights in Eurostat's series are growth. The other 2.6 to 2.8 million, or 55% to 59%, reflect the wider count (our estimate from the rounded percentage). The same break runs through every region; Sardinia's 2025 figures show the same gap between ISTAT's rate and the Region's.

The break distorts the split by origin even more. Read across the two bases, Eurostat's figures put foreign nights up 43.1% in 2025 and Italian nights up 18.4% (our calculations, Italian nights as total minus foreign). On the Region's like-for-like count, the rises were 23% and 4%. The broken series more than quadruples the Italian growth rate. Anyone quoting a 2025 growth figure for either market needs to say which count it comes from. Arrivals show the same pattern. Eurostat counts 6,706,152 arrivals in 2025 against 5,105,838 in 2024, a rise of 31.3% across the two bases (our calculation). The Region's like-for-like rise is 13%, from 6,698,616 arrivals on its provisional count.

On the closest available comparison, Puglia grew faster than Italy. ISTAT puts Italy's 2025 nights at 481 million without non-business private lodgings, against 466,158,045 in 2024 on the same coverage. That is a rise of about 3.2% (our calculation from the rounded 481 million). Puglia's regional count rose 10%. The two counts come from different publishers and the regional one includes rentals, so the comparison is indicative. ISTAT's national figure with private lodgings, over 535 million nights, rose 14.87%, as reported by Italpress, and it carries the same break as Puglia's +26.73%.

The longer run: foreign visitors did the growing

Puglia's growth before 2025 can be read on one basis. Eurostat's series, which follows ISTAT's old coverage up to 2024, puts Puglia's nights at 15,441,469 in 2019 and 17,894,361 in 2024. That is a rise of 15.9% over five years (our calculation). The path was not smooth. Nights fell to 10,133,031 in 2020, recovered to 13,874,818 in 2021 and passed the 2019 level in 2022 at 16,118,097. They reached 16,822,144 in 2023.

Nearly all of it came from abroad. Foreign nights rose from 3,842,825 to 6,031,556, up 57.0%. Nights by Italian residents rose from 11,598,644 to 11,862,805, up 2.3% (our calculations; the Italian figure is total minus foreign). The foreign share of Puglia's nights went from 24.9% in 2019 to 33.7% in 2024. On Eurostat's new 2025 basis it was 38.1%, a figure that cannot be compared directly with the earlier ones.

Pugliapromozione's BIT presentation adds a longer view from ISTAT data. Puglia's nights rose from 13,526,151 in 2015 to 17,894,361 in 2024, up 32.3%. The presentation ranks that second among Italian regions, behind Lazio's 63.4%, against 18.7% for Italy.

Stays are getting shorter. Nights per arrival fell from 3.63 in 2019 to 3.50 in 2024, and were 3.38 in 2025 on the new basis (our calculations from Eurostat).

Puglia remains a mid-sized destination by Italian standards. It held 3.8% of Italy's nights in 2024 on ISTAT's old basis. In 2025 it held 4.2% of the 535,463,245 nights that Eurostat's 21 Italian regional figures add up to (our calculation; both on the new basis). Eurostat lists Bolzano and Trento separately, which is why it has 21 figures for Italy's 20 regions. Relative to its population (Eurostat's figure for 1 January 2025), Puglia had 5.8 tourist nights per resident in 2025, 13th of Italy's 20 regions and below the Italian figure of 9.1. On the old 2024 basis it had 4.6. Our ranking of Italy's regions by tourist nights per resident sets out both years and the method.

Italians still account for most of Puglia's tourism. On the regional count they spent 14,056,429 nights in 2025, or 61.9% of the total (our calculation). Their nights grew 4%, a fraction of the foreign rate. On ISTAT's old basis, Italian nights in 2024 were only 2.3% above 2019. The domestic market has held its level. The growth has come from abroad.

Foreign markets, and who books "puglia holidays"

On the like-for-like regional count, foreign visitors spent 8,631,926 nights in Puglia in 2025, up 23%, and made 3,007,514 arrivals, up 25%. Italians spent 14,056,429 nights, up 4%, with 3,690,426 arrivals, up 5%. Foreign visitors made 44.9% of arrivals and 38.1% of nights, on the shares the presentation prints. They stay a little less long, at 2.9 nights per arrival against 3.8 for Italians (our calculations).

France and Germany lead. France recorded 1,226,407 nights and Germany 1,162,557. The United States came third with 608,145 nights, up 26.5%, which Pugliapromozione calls the first market outside Europe by volume and length of stay. Poland followed with 579,565 nights, up 30%. These four markets account for 41.4% of foreign nights (our calculation).

The United Kingdom is Puglia's fifth foreign market. British visitors spent 527,144 nights in the region in 2025, up 80,247 on 2024, or 18% (our calculation). That is 6.1% of foreign nights. The regional count does not separate British arrivals in the material we read. The Bank of Italy counted 7.0 million travelers to Italy from the UK in 2025, 6.6 million of them staying overnight, and €5.3 billion of spending, and our analysis of British tourists in Italy covers that national picture. No official source splits those travelers by region. Nationally, British visitors stayed 5.3 nights on average and spent €151.5 a night in 2025, on the Bank of Italy's survey. There is no regional equivalent for Puglia.

British interest in Puglia shows up most clearly in search. UK users search "puglia holidays" about 2,600 times a month, with a further 900 for "holidays to puglia", 700 for "holidays in puglia" and 600 for "puglia italy holidays" (Ahrefs estimates, November 2026). In the United States the travel term is "puglia italy", at about 39,000 searches a month. Ryanair added a Bari to Bristol route for summer 2026, one of three new routes from Bari in its 4 March 2026 announcement. No source we found gives British passenger numbers at Bari or Brindisi.

Foreign spending has risen too, on the Region's figures. Pugliapromozione's presentation puts foreign visitors' spending in Puglia at €1,813 million in 2025, "almost triple" the €635 million of 2019, and cites the Bank of Italy, with the fourth quarter of 2025 estimated. The Bank's national report of 26 June 2026 has no regional table. Its only geographic split inside Italy is a macro-area: the South and islands, where foreign visitors spent €10,328 million in 2025. We could not check the Puglia figure against a Bank publication.

Getting there: Bari carries the growth, and most of it is international

Puglia's four airports handled 11,492,191 passengers in 2025 on Assaeroporti's figures, up 7.2% on 2024 and 39.4% on 2019 (our sums of the four airport rows). Bari handled 7,977,881, up 9.7%. Brindisi handled 3,444,438, up 1.7%. Foggia handled 69,151. Taranto-Grottaglie recorded 721 passengers, almost all of them general aviation, and had no scheduled service. Assaeroporti credits the data for all four to Aeroporti 2030. The operator of the four airports is Aeroporti di Puglia.

The growth at Bari was international. Its international passengers rose 17.2% in 2025 to 4,553,645, or 57.1% of its traffic. Domestic passengers rose 1.0%. At Brindisi, international traffic was flat at 949,192, or 27.6% of the total. Across the four airports, international passengers made up 47.9% of traffic (our calculation). Aeroporti di Puglia reported, via ANSA on 4 August 2026, that Bari's international passengers rose 20.5% in January to July 2026 to 2,922,173, against 1.6% growth in domestic traffic. That article's own components do not add up to its totals, so we use only the headline rates.

Growth continued in 2026. From January to September 2026, Bari handled 6,856,254 passengers, up 11.8%, and Brindisi 3,025,165, up 10.2%, on Assaeroporti's figures. Foggia fell 27.2%. Aeroporti di Puglia reports a slightly lower network figure for the same nine months, 9,895,019 against 9,926,883 on our sum of the Assaeroporti rows. Our analysis of Bari's 2026 growth alongside Palermo, Olbia and Cagliari compares the southern airports on one series.

Airport traffic is large relative to the population. The four airports handled 2.97 passengers per resident in 2025 and 2.57 in the first nine months of 2026 (our calculations, using 3,865,277 residents, ISTAT's provisional figure for 1 January 2026 as published by Tuttitalia; the nights-per-resident figures above use Eurostat's 1 January 2025 population). Passengers are not visitors. Each round trip counts twice, residents fly too, and Bari also serves travelers heading to Matera in Basilicata.

No local tax cut explains the growth. Italy's municipal surcharge on airline tickets has been lifted or offset in several regions, as our report on the airport tax and Ryanair sets out. We found no Puglia measure. Ryanair's 4 March 2026 release asked the national government and the Region to scrap the surcharge. The Region's resolution DGR 1002 of 14 July 2025 grants Aeroporti di Puglia up to €500,000 for 2025 to promote air connectivity and incoming tourism, and does not mention the surcharge. Ryanair says it runs 82 routes from Bari and Brindisi in summer 2026 and carries "over 7 million passengers per year" in Puglia. That is its own figure, and it covers a full year while its route count covers one season. No independent source gives passengers by airline at either airport. Wizz Air says it is Bari's second carrier, with a 12.1% market share at Bari, and offers more than 905,000 seats on 14 international routes from Bari and Brindisi in summer 2026, according to its figures reported by Italiavola & Travel on 18 June 2026. The same report lists Wizz Air's seven Italian bases, none of them in Puglia. These are airline statements about seats and shares, and no official source confirms them.

Sea arrivals add a smaller stream. The port authority for the southern Adriatic counted over 516,000 cruise passengers from January to September 2025, up 14%, including about 430,000 at Bari, and over 1.5 million ferry passengers across its ports, which also include Termoli in Molise. We found no full-year 2025 port figures.

Hotels, holiday homes and rentals

The regional count splits Puglia's 2025 nights three ways. Hotels recorded 10,195,233 nights, up 6%. Other registered (extra-hotel) accommodation recorded 8,576,123, up 10%. Tourist rentals recorded 3,883,031 nights, up 25%, from 1,250,142 arrivals, up 28%. Rentals made up 17.1% of nights (our calculation). Their 2024 figure was about 3.1 million nights on the stated growth rate (our calculation).

Length of stay differs by type. Hotels recorded 3,233,868 arrivals, an average of 3.15 nights each. Other registered accommodation recorded 2,208,074 arrivals and 3.88 nights each. Rentals averaged 3.11 nights (our calculations from the regional count). Rental guests in Puglia do not stay longer than hotel guests on these figures, and the longest stays are in the extra-hotel segment.

Rentals were the fastest-growing segment, and they did not drive most of the growth. On the regional figures, hotels and other registered accommodation added well over a million nights between them (our calculation from the stated rates), more than the rentals' roughly 780,000. The provisional status applies to every segment.

Puglia was the first region where owners could register rentals in the national database that issues the national identification code, the CIN. Access opened there on 3 June 2024, before the rest of Italy, as a pilot (finanzaefisco.com, 6 June 2024). That database is what lets ISTAT count private rentals from 2025, according to its data story of 17 July 2026. We found no official count of CIN-registered units in Puglia. National counts exist and do not agree with each other; our guide to Italy's rental code and key-box rules sets out the two figures.

Capacity data are older and harder to read. Eurostat's capacity dataset for Puglia gives 10,133 establishments and 301,782 bed-places in 2023, of which hotels had 110,540 bed-places. The same data show a 20% fall in establishments on the previous year, which looks like a change in coverage rather than closures. We do not report a capacity trend.

The tourist tax is the one revenue figure. Pugliapromozione reports €26.3 million collected in 2025, up 14% from €23 million in 2024, from SIOPE public accounts data. A chart in the same presentation reads €26.6 million. The text figure matches the stated growth.

What nobody measures in Puglia

No source counts the number of people who visit Puglia. Arrivals count check-ins at registered accommodation. A visitor who stays in two places counts twice, and a visitor staying with friends does not count at all.

No final regional count for 2025 has been published in the documents we found. The 22,689,935 nights figure dates from January 2026 data. Eurostat's figure is definitive, but it does not split nights by type of accommodation or by country.

No absolute 2024 figure exists on the same basis as 2025. The Region gives growth rates and an "over 20.7 million" summary. ISTAT gives a 2024 count without private rentals. Neither restates 2024 to the new coverage.

No one publishes how many rental units operate in Puglia, how many were registered, or how many were removed. No source splits Puglia's foreign spending, British arrivals or airline shares at Bari and Brindisi. Day visitors, cruise passengers who do not stay overnight and unregistered stays sit outside every count. No source we found measures how rental growth affects housing for residents in Puglia's towns.

Seasonality is barely published. The only monthly regional figure in the material we read is January 2025, with 329,800 nights, up 17%, in the Osservatorio's summary. We found no official summer 2025 figure for Puglia and no monthly breakdown for the full year. Provincial figures appear in the BIT presentation, but its layout does not let us pair every value with a province with confidence, so we do not report them.

Some figures in circulation come with little or no method. The BIT presentation gives the tourism value chain as €13.9 billion in 2025, 16.3% of regional value added and about 200,000 workers. It does not state how these were estimated. Aeroporti di Puglia, presenting its 2025 accounts (Italiavola & Travel, 29 May 2026), estimates that ten years of traffic growth, 97% over the period, created 16,000 new jobs and added about €1 billion to annual GDP. It derives both from macroeconomic multipliers it does not detail, and neither is a count of current jobs or output.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

For travelers, the numbers describe a region with more foreign visitors each year and fewer tourist nights per resident than Italy as a whole. Puglia had 5.8 tourist nights per resident in 2025, against 9.1 for Italy. Its foreign nights rose 23% on the like-for-like count, and Bari's international passengers rose 17.2%. No official source we read measures crowding by town or by month. Our Puglia, Italy travel guide covers where and when to go.

For businesses, the regional count is the one to plan with. It included rentals in 2024 too and shows hotels up 6%, other registered accommodation up 10% and rentals up 25%. Foreign demand is concentrated in France, Germany, the United States and Poland, and the United States and Poland grew fastest among the four. Passenger traffic at Bari kept growing through September 2026. The 2025 figures are provisional, and the Region has not published a final count in the documents we found.

For analysts, never compute Puglia's 2025 growth from ISTAT's or Eurostat's 2024 figure. Use 17,894,361 for 2024 only with its scope, and 22,678,354 for 2025 with its scope. For a growth rate, use the Region's like-for-like series and say it is provisional. Arrivals are check-ins, airport passengers count both directions, and Ryanair's passenger claims are its own. Eurostat's dataset carries no break flag on 2025, so a download alone will not warn you. When ISTAT or the Region publishes a 2024 figure restated to the new coverage, the series can be joined.