The EU tourism industry, and that of Cypurs, is bouncing strongly back from the Covid-19 pandemic, with data for 2022 closely mirroring that for 2019, a report released by Eurostat on Tuesday showed.

Throughout the first half of 2022, Cyprus recorded 5,028 million overnight stays, compared to 6,790 million stays in the same period in of 2019, it said.

The number drastically decreased to 1,236 million in 2020, when the pandemic hit, and to 1,691 million stays in the same period in 2021.

The island also reached the target of surpassing the number of flights recorded last year, the deputy ministry of tourism said in a statement on Monday.

At EU level, compared with the first half of 2019, the total number of nights spent in tourist accommodation in the first half year of 2022 was still inferior – 1.01 billion in 2022 against 1.18 billion in 2019 – but to a lesser extent than in 2020, when it was calculated at 474.7 million, and 2021, at 406.8 million.

Compared with the first half year of 2021, in the same period of 2022, nights spent in tourist accommodation were up by 149 per cent, with substantial increases in all six months, according to Eurostat.

April was the month with the highest increase, up 302 per cent compared with April 2021.

Data for the first half of 2022 also show that international tourism has recovered significantly, with 432.9 million overnight stays recorded by foreign tourists during this period, up by 154 per cent compared with the same period in 2020, and by 401 per cent compared with 2021.