August 31, 2018
The Republic of Slovenia Statistical Office (Statistični urad RS, SURS) has just released figures on tourism for July 2018. These show over 825,000 arrivals and just under 2.5 million tourist overnight stays for the month, with foreign visitors accounting for more than 77% of all such overnight stays, with around 1.9 million nights sleeping in the country.
The nationalities of visitors to Slovenia was rather diverse and well-dispersed. Germans were most likely to spend the night, at 13% of the total, followed by guests from the Netherlands (10%), Belgium (7%), the Czech Republic (7%), Italy (6%) and Austria (6%).
While at times it may have looked or felt like all the tourists in Slovenia were at Lake Bled, the figures tell another story. True, the highest number of overnight stays in July was recorded in alpine areas, including Bled, making up 35% of the total (or almost 868,000 stays), but other places still had strong appeal, with the coast seeing 23% of such stays, spa resorts 16%, and Ljubljana 13%.
More detailed provisional monthly data on accommodation capacities and tourist arrivals and overnight stays by municipalities, and tourist arrivals and overnight stays by countries can be found on the SURS website, or by clicking the highlighted text in this sentence.
However, the STA notes that these figures cannot easily be compared with those for July 2017, as a new data collection method was used this year, based on a new register of accommodation facilities and the new eTourism system. These include all facilities, including those with fewer than 10 beds, and thus while last year’s statistics covered around 2,000 places, since March 2018 this number has been more than 5,000. The impact of this change on the figures is estimated to be around 10 percentage points.
With that in mind, the statistics for July 2017 showed that around 680,000 visitors spent over 1.87 million nights in Slovenia, compared to over 825,000 arrivals and just under 2.5 million this year.
