LISBON (Reuters) – Portugal’s once-booming tourism sector registered another month of disastrous numbers in June as contagion fears and travel restrictions due to the coronavirus outbreak continued to keep visitors away, official data released on Monday showed.
In its flash estimate, the National Statistics Institute (INE) said the number of overnight stays by foreign tourists in dropped 96% to around 201,000 last month from a year ago.
The total number of guests, including domestic travellers, fell nearly 82% in June to just over 500,000 people, a slight improvement from a drop of over 94% in May, INE said, adding that in June around 45% of tourist accommodation establishments were shut or had no guests.
Overnight stays by Britons, one of the country’s biggest foreign markets, fell over 98% in June compared to the same period in 2019, followed by a massive drop in the German and Spanish markets, decreasing 95.1% and 93.3% respectively.
(Reporting by Catarina Demony, Editing by Andrei Khalip)
