Erfurt (dpa/th) - Thuringia remains the country for short trips and has not yet reached the level of guests and overnight stays before the Corona crisis. This emerges from the tourism figures for the first half of the year, which the State Statistical Office published in Erfurt on Friday. From January to the end of June, 1.4 million guests came to Bavaria. They booked 3.8 million overnight stays in hotels, guesthouses or campsites. On average, they stayed 2.7 days, the statisticians determined.
Compared to the first half of the Corona year 2021, in which gastronomy and the hotel industry were almost paralyzed for weeks, Thuringia almost doubled the number of guests with an increase of 989,000. The number of overnight stays even rose by around 2.2 million. However, both values remained well below 2019 - the year before the corona pandemic.
According to the state office, the number of guests was almost 24 percent lower than in the first half of 2019, and the number of overnight stays was around 19 percent lower. There were declines in all regions. The southern Harz/Kyffhäuser region recorded the lowest losses with minus 12 percent. A far cry from the 2019 figures were Thuringia's most important travel destinations, the cities of Eisenach, Erfurt, Jena, Weimar and the Thuringian Forest. There alone, a total of 617,000 fewer overnight stays were booked compared to the pre-crisis period.
