Europe: booming but brittle

Europe’s tourism boom did not fade with the end of the post-pandemic rebound. It hardened into something bigger. UN Tourism says international arrivals worldwide rose another 4% in 2025 to about 1.52 billion, and Europe remained the world’s busiest region through that growth (untourism.int). Inside Europe, the pattern is clear. Demand is shifting toward places that still promise warmth, short flights, and a feeling of relative safety, even in the off-season (etc-corporate.org). That helps explain why southern Europe keeps pulling traffic forward into months that used to be quieter. The European Travel Commission found that 73% of Europeans planned trips between October 2025 and March 2026, with 64% favoring travel within Europe and 52% naming southern Europe and the Mediterranean as their preferred destination region. Air travel demand also rose to 57% in that survey, even as 11% of respondents said overcrowding was already a concern (etc-corporate.org). More people are traveling. More of them are going to the same kinds of places. That is why the boom already looks strained. The big winners are not hard to spot. Spain set a new record in 2025 with 96.8 million foreign visitors and €134.7 billion in international tourist spending, according to the Spanish government (lamoncloa.gob.es). Portugal also posted another record year. Turismo de Portugal says 2025 brought 32.5 million guests, including 19.7 million foreign visitors, with tourism revenue up 5% from 2024 (turismodeportugal.pt). Ireland’s tourism agencies are still talking in forward-looking terms rather than publishing a comparable early-2026 surge number, but Tourism Ireland launched its 2026 plan around the expectation of sustained growth in overseas visitor spending and wider market diversification (tourismireland.com). France sits a little differently in this story. It is not the upstart. It is the giant that keeps getting bigger. Atout France says the country welcomed 102 million international visitors in 2025 and generated a record €77.5 billion in international tourism revenue, both all-time highs (atout-france.fr). So when France draws outsized attention for spring 2026, that is not a surprise trend emerging from nowhere. It is the gravitational pull of Europe’s biggest tourism machine getting stronger at the same moment travelers are looking for familiar, high-capacity destinations inside the continent. The problem is that capacity is not the same thing as resilience. The EU’s own tourism platform described 2025 as a year when tourism looked robust on the surface but kept running into workforce shortages and a sharper debate over impact, balance, and long-term resilience (transition-pathways.europa.eu). That tension shows up fastest in places built around narrow historic cores, seasonal labor, and fragile transport links. Dubrovnik-Neretva County is a good example because the numbers are strong and uneasy at the same time. In March 2026, the county recorded 43,908 arrivals and 118,354 overnight stays, up 15% and 17% from a year earlier, according to figures reported from Croatia’s eVisitor system. For the full first quarter, arrivals were up 5% and overnight stays rose 8% (thedubrovniktimes.com). That is exactly what a destination wants in theory. In practice, it means the shoulder season is starting to look less like relief and more like an early warning. Because the bottleneck is often not desire. It is movement. On March 4, 2026, AirHelp tracked 283 delayed flights and 82 cancellations across major European hubs including Gatwick, Schiphol, Barcelona, Athens, and Copenhagen, with knock-on effects for leisure routes and connections across the region (airhelp.com). A tourism system can post record demand and still feel brittle if one bad operational day ripples through airport networks, hotel staffing, and transfer chains. Europe is not short on visitors. It is short on slack. In Dubrovnik-Neretva, that reality now looks like 118,354 overnight stays in a single March.