Tourism in Rome during the COVID-19 pandemic
The travel limitations enforced globally to limit the spread of the virus hit Rome’s tourism sector hard. The number of international arrivals in Rome’s tourist accommodation, for instance, experienced an 86 percent annual drop in the first year of the health crisis. In 2021, inbound arrivals slightly rose, totaling around 1.6 million, but remained way below pre-pandemic levels. International visits from the United States, the leading inbound travel market in Rome, were particularly impacted during the pandemic. While tourist establishments in the city welcomed more than 1.5 million guests from the U.S. in 2019, this figure shrunk to less than 220 thousand in 2021.Although the COVID-19 crisis disrupted international travel more than domestic tourism, the number of domestic arrivals in Rome did not recover yet in 2021, standing at 2.3 million. While this number denoted a 52 percent increase over the previous year, it did not manage to catch up with the peak in domestic arrivals reported in 2019. When looking at Italian visitors, hotels played an important role in the city’s national travel market, as domestic arrivals in hotels accounted for over 80 percent of total arrivals in Rome by Italian travelers in 2021.