Tourists spent a massive 87.5 billion euros in the Netherlands last year, Statistics Netherlands reported on Wednesday. The number of jobs in the tourism sector increased by 27 thousand to 791 thousand jobs.
Compared to 2017, tourist spending increased by 6.4 percent last year in absolute numbers. Adjusted for price changes, the increase was 4.1 percent.
The police arrested three men on th A16 highway near Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht on Sunday night for impersonating police officers and trying to fine tourists. They were dressed in clothes that resemble the Dutch police uniform, the Dordrecht police said on Facebook.
At a parking lot on the A16, the fake cops asked a tourist for his ID documents. The tourist did not trust the situation and called the police. The fake cops fled towards Rotterdam.
Domestic tourism in the large Dutch cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht increased by 54 percent since 2012. This seems to show that Dutch are not very sensitive to the consequences of mass tourism and therefore avoiding the large cities, ABN Amro's economic office reported on Tuesday, NU.nl reports.
The number of tourists that stayed in accommodation in the Netherlands last year increased by nearly 9 percent to 42 million. That is the strongest growth since 2006, according to figures Statistics Netherlands released on Wednesday.
Statistics Netherlands' figures do not include overnight stays in accommodations with fewer than five rooms, which means that most tourists booking accommodation through online platforms like Airbnb are not included in these figures.
The number of foreign tourists who visited the Netherlands last year increased by 11 percent to a total of 17.6 million people, according to figures from NBTC Holland Marketing. Together they spent 12.9 billion euros in the Netherlands, AD reports.
Most foreign visitors came from Germany last year. Over 5 million Germans visited the Netherlands. Belgium came in second place with over 2.2 million visitors, and the United Kingdom with just under 2.2 million. The number of visitors from Russia increased the most with 33 percent to around 175 thousand.
The number of foreign tourists visiting the Netherlands grew by 5.5 percent to more than 15.8 million last year, according to a report by Statistics Netherlands and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). The tourism growth is stronger in the Netherlands than in most other European countries.
World wide tourism grew by an average of 4.8 percent per year since 2008. Last year the number of tourists worldwide grew by 3.9 percent to more than 1.2 billion. Asia and Oceania and Africa are particularly benefiting from the growth, while Europe's growth was more variable.
