From Egypt to New Zealand – the Germans are once again drawn to faraway places

Germans are increasingly going abroad again on vacation, despite inflation, the Ukraine war and Corona: 16 percent of Germans are planning a trip overseas for the current year. This corresponds to around a fifth more long-distance trips compared to 2022 and more than double compared to 2020 and 2021, when only 6.5 and 7.4 percent of Germans spent their main vacation outside of Europe.

The Foundation for Future Questions reports these figures in its current tourism analysis, for which 3,000 German citizens were surveyed representatively. However, the figure forecast for 2023 does not match the record value of 2019, when 17.2 percent of Germans spent holidays in countries outside of Europe.

According to the tourism analysis, North America, North Africa and countries in the Far East were the most popular in 2022. In 2023, these regions of the world should also be in demand, as well as Australia and the Pacific islands.

The most important reasons for the increased popularity of long-distance travel: Many Germans have a need to catch up, the corona restrictions have fallen in almost all countries, and the disease has also lost its terror. Holidays abroad are no longer characterized by unsafe travel conditions, fear of quarantine stays, expensive PCR tests or concerns about a corona infection.

The Berlin-based agency Visum applied for, which is one of the five largest in Europe, confirms the wanderlust trend. She compared the number of visa applications she received for various long-haul destinations in January 2023 with the figures from January 2022. Result: Egypt (plus 175 percent), Kenya (plus 130 percent) and Canada (plus 119 percent) more than doubled, Sri Lanka (95 percent) and the USA (56 percent) also recorded significant increases.

A spectacular increase was registered for those countries that still had particularly strict corona entry restrictions at the beginning of 2022. Australia received more than six times as many visa applications (up 673 percent) and India almost ten times as many (up 917 percent). New Zealand, which was almost completely sealed off a year ago due to the pandemic, is at the top of the statistics with an increase of 10,638 percent.