Hungary · International Tourist Arrivals

## What this measures

International arrivals in Hungary in a year: visitors whose usual home is in another country. Yearly, dated December 31.

## Why it matters

Arrivals are the volume behind tourism revenue: hotel, airline and retail demand, service exports and jobs in travel-dependent economies.

## How to read it

Number of arrivals, not people: someone who visits twice counts twice. Compare a country with its own past; cross-country comparisons need care, because countries count differently. The series runs from 1995 to 2020. The World Bank publishes no year after 2020 (checked against its October 2026 update), so the series shows the fall in travel in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, but not the recovery.

## What it does not say

The World Bank's note for Hungary: "Includes overnight visitors (tourists) and same-day visitors (excursionists). Arrivals of non-resident visitors at national borders. Due to the coronavirus epidemic in 2020, emergency measures were introduced, border traffic was significantly lower than usual. In the second quarter of 2020, data collection was suspended, so the production of these data was done by model estimation and imputation. Due to the low number of data providers, the reliability of the published data has decreased and they are only to a limited extent comparable with the data of previous periods. The observation of the borders with the countries of the Schengen Area ceased from the year 2008. Departures of non-resident visitors." Some countries count every visitor at the border, including same-day visitors; others count only overnight tourists, or only guests in hotels and other accommodation. Methods change over time, which can break a series.

## Source

UN Tourism (Yearbook of Tourism Statistics, Compendium of Tourism Statistics and data files) via World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator `ST.INT.ARVL`. Licence per the World Bank's indicator metadata: CC BY 4.0. Attribution: World Bank WDI (CC BY 4.0), compiled from UN Tourism data. Palanor reads it each month (/api/cron/worldbank-sync) and rewrites the history.