In 2021, 11.3 million people in the EU were employed in tourism-related (but not necessarily exclusively dependent) economic activities: 6.8 million in the food and beverage industry, 2.1 million in the accommodation sector, 1.8 million in the transport sector and 400,000 in travel agencies and tour operators.
Three industries that depend almost entirely on tourism (accommodation, travel agencies/tour operators and air transport) employ 2.8 million people in the EU.
The tourism workforce is dominated by women
The tourism industry is a major employer of women: in 2023, 57.6% of specific tourism industry employees were women, 21.2 percentage points (pp) higher than the overall non-financial business economy (36.4%).
The proportion of part-time employment in the tourism industry (21.3%) was 6.1 percentage points higher than in the non-financial business economy as a whole (15.2%).
Source datasets: lfsa_epgan2, lfsa_egan22d, lfsa_egaed, lfsa_egan, lfsa_egdn2, tour_lfs1r2, tour_lfs2r2, tour_lfs3r2, tour_lfs4r2, tour_lfs5r2, tour_lfs6r2
The tourism industry has a slightly higher proportion of younger workers, with 11.0% of workers aged 15 to 24 years old, compared to 9.0% in the non-financial business economy.
In 2023, the share of low-educated people in the tourism industry will be 20.2%, approaching that of the overall economy (18.9%).
Foreigners make up 15.9% of the tourism industry’s workforce (7% from other EU countries and 9% from non-EU countries), 5.3 percentage points higher than the non-financial business economy as a whole (10.6%).
Those in the tourism industry were 8.8 percentage points more likely to hold a temporary contract than non-financial workers overall (20.8% vs. 12.0% of employed people).
Similarly, a higher proportion of new hires in the tourism industry had been in their current job for less than a year than the non-financial industry overall (23.1% vs. 14.8%).
