Domestic or International?

Yesterday I got back from a two day trip up the Costa Brava north of Barcelona. While there I read a piece by the Economist on the impact of Covid on German holiday spending. Two quotes stood out:

Germans account for roughly one in every four euros dished out by European tourists.

And

For many Italians, Spaniards, French folk and Greeks, holidaying anywhere other than in their home country seems perverse. By contrast, young Germans who choose to do so “might come across as a little bit backward,” says Sina Fabian, a historian at Humboldt University. “We can also do GERMANY!” is the slightly desperate motto adopted by one travel agency.

The size of German holiday spending will be apparent to anyone who has been to Alicante or Mallorca, but I was surprised by the idea that foreign vacations are more appealing to Northern Europeans than to their southern cousins.

My Catalan housemate looked at me quizzically: “have you been to England?”

The data backs him and The Economist up. According to UK data, 60% of people had at least one foreign vacation. Only 26% traveled solely domestically.

The opposite seems to be true for Spain, where under 10% of all vacations are international.

This pattern holds going back at least as far as 2010, the earliest date I could find data:

Data on Italian tourists was a little harder to come by, but this 2019 paper on the international travel habits of Italians showed destinations like Spain or France are more than twice as popular as Germany or the UKA.

The most obvious explanations are weather and cost. The second most popular holiday category in the UK is a beach holiday. Mediterranean countries offer that, at an affordable price stable. A city like Barcelona offers families a city break and beach holiday rolled into one.

For the Italians and Spaniards I’ve spoken to, there is no reason to cross borders when they have everything at home. You can ski the Pyrenees and be on a beach three hours later.

I wonder if this domestic preference has any meaningful effect on the nation’s collective international outlook. At the same time, it is not obvious that a rowdy weekend in Ibiza or Mallorca does much in the way of acculturation.