Analytics, Baltic States – CIS, Covid-19, Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Tourism

The biggest numbers of visitors arrived from Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. 

Kristjan Erik Loik, analyst at Statistics Estonia, said that the number of international tourists in the summer months was small due to the coronavirus related restrictions. During the three months,  290,000 foreign tourists stayed at the accommodation establishments of Estonia. 

"We have to give our due to Latvians, who found an opportunity to come to Estonia despite the overall travel restrictions. Of Latvian tourists, close to 58,000 stayed at our accommodation establishments in the three summer months, just one percent less than last year. In August there was even one-third more of them than in the same month last year," Loik said.

The number of tourists from Lithuania was smaller by 13% and the number of tourists from Finland by 52% than in the summer of 2019. In absolute terms, Finnish tourists were still the biggest group in Estonia, numbering close to 143,000 in the three months, down from 301,000 in the same period last year. 

The top three of countries from which foreign tourists came to Estonia in the summer of 2019 were Finland, Germany and Russia. This summer, places two and three were taken by Latvia and Lithuania.

The number of tourists from Russia plummeted 16-fold -- to slightly fewer than 4,000 visitors from 65,000 in June-August 2019.