Belgium scores badly for tourism, but improvement is on the cards
Back in January one of my first postings on this BLOG was ‘Belgium-Europe’s best kept secret’ (see ARCHIVE at the bottom of this page to read that posting).In that BLOG I wrote about how wonderful Belgium was to visit as a tourist but how poorly the country sold itself internationally . This opinion has been borne out by recent Eurostat figures .The tourism index is calculated from the sum of the number of nights of stay, both from national and international tourists, divided by the number of residents. This results in an index for the whole of Europe of 4.7. Belgium hardly makes 2.8. All our surrounding countries do better and fluctuate around the European average. The fact that the index is lower with a high density of the population works against Belgium. The French and the British for instance much more often travel for a few days in their own country than Belgians do. Perhaps the rather unique Belgian phenomenon of a second home at the coast or the Ardenne also plays a role, because those nights are not counted by Eurostat. In a reaction Tourism Flanders says that it reported better figures year after year, so that the Flemish index has risen to a more positive 3.17.