Lithuania expects 13% more foreign tourists this year
Lithuania is expected to receive a total of 1.3 million foreign tourists this year, or 13 percent more than last year, Karolis Žemaitis, Deputy Minister of Economy and Innovation, has said.
“We had almost a million tourists in the first eight months of 2023, and it is likely that we will reach that figure of 1.3 million by the end of the year. We will have a fairly high growth rate compared to last year, or even more so the year before,” Žemaitis told a conference on Lithuanian tourism at the parliament on Monday.
“But if our reference point is 2019, we can see that we still have room for improvement,” he added.
According to the data from the Lithuanian tourism promotion agency Travel Lithuania, more than 1.9 million foreign tourists visited Lithuania in 2019.
“We have already seen a recovery of domestic tourism that is active and fast enough, while the recovery of foreign tourists is slower – not because of the pandemic, but because of other challenges, including the security situation,” Žemaitis said.
“We cannot yet assess how the Israel-Hamas war will change the dynamics of Israeli tourists to Lithuania in the coming years, but this is also a factor that we have to take into account,” he added.
According to the deputy minister, the recovery of inbound tourism compared to pre-pandemic 2019 is currently 67 percent, while that of domestic tourism is 118 percent.