Stats: Number of Guests Staying in Tourism Facilities Up by 7% Y-o-Y in 2025

Bratislava, 11 February (TASR) - The number of tourists accommodated in hotels and guest houses in Slovakia rose by more than 7 percent year-on-year (y-o-y) to 6.3 million in 2025, the Statistics Office reported on Wednesday. This was the second-most successful year ever for accommodation providers, as the number of guests was only 1.3 percent (or 86,000 people) below the record set in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. Tourism reached its peak in terms of visitor numbers just before the pandemic - in 2019, when the number of visitors exceeded 6 million per year. In the following two years (2020 and 2021), visitor numbers fell sharply to around half the previous level as the result of anti-pandemic measures. As of 2022, hotels and guest houses have experienced only a gradual return to pre-pandemic levels. They came closest to that level last year, but still didn't manage to surpass it. In 2025, accommodation providers posted a record number of guests in four of the 12 months (January, February, August and December). However, this wasn't enough to break the record for the year as a whole. The number of overnight stays also increased. In 2025, visitors spent 16.2 million nights in Slovakia, up 6.5 percent y-o-y. The number of nights spent fell just under 9-percent short of the record set in 2019. Visitors spent 2.5 nights in Slovakia on average last year. Almost two thirds of the accommodated tourists were domestic visitors, whose number reached 3.9 million, while foreign ones amounted to 2.4 million. Although both figures posted y-o-y increases, they failed to surpass the records set in 2019. The domestic clientele figure was closer to the pre-pandemic year, just 1 percent below. Overall visitor numbers in 2025 were positively influenced by increased interest from abroad, with foreign guests just shy of the 2019 level by some 54,000 visitors (2 percent). The positive y-o-y trend was also reflected at the regional level. In 2025, all eight regions of Slovakia posted more guests than in the previous year, with increases ranging from 3.5 percent in Nitra region to 9.8 percent in Zilina region. The most frequently-visited regions in 2025 were Bratislava, Zilina and Presov, each welcoming over 1 million tourists. ko/df