Originally Posted by
Global321
I think you are underestimating the impact. From Forbes...
... “Tourism contributes 10% to EU GDP and creates jobs for 26 million people,” (All foreign tourism, not just USA)
....According to the report,
visitors from the U.S. made up an astonishing half of total hotel nights in the bloc in 2016. That’s 74 of 137 million. In the same year Europe accounted for:
- 25% of all U.S. residents’ overseas trips
- 35% of U.S. residents’ leisure and VFR trips
- 43% of U.S. residents’ trips for MICE travel
(Forbes source: European Commission's European Union Tourism Trends.)
Forbes has seriously misunderstood the data in the report, and the journalist who wrote that claim should have sensed that something was wrong.
The report says that the total number of nights spent at hotels in the EU in 2016 was 3.1
billion, of which 74
million (i.e. about 2.4%) were accounted for by visitors from the US. Americans don't even make up half of non-European visitors, as the biggest source of non-European visitors to the EU is the Asia-Pacific region.
The full report is here:
European Union Tourism Trends (e-unwto.org)