Cyprus’ tourism sector delivered a new record year in 2025, in both arrivals and revenues. Total tourist arrivals reached 4.5 million (mn), up from 4.0 mn in 2024 (+12.2% y-o-y), with a strong year-end reinforcing momentum.
The income story is even stronger: cumulative tourism receipts for Jan–Nov rose to €3.6 billion, a 15.3% y-o-y increase that outpaced inflation, implying a clear real uplift in tourism-driven income and wider service-sector turnover. Expenditure per person increased by 4.6%, while expenditure per day rose by 9.2% in Jan–Nov 2025, indicating that revenue gains were not solely volume-driven. Higher per-visitor spending also played a meaningful role, reinforcing the strength of tourism-led income growth. Monthly arrivals followed the familiar seasonal pattern—building from spring and peaking in summer—but ran above recent years throughout much of the high season (see Graph 1), supporting employment, fiscal receipts and corporate earnings across hospitality, transport, and retail.
Graph 1: Tourism Arrivals per month, 2023-25
Source: Cystat, Eurobank Research
The composition of demand points to increased diversification, while the supply side signals a structural upgrade in accessibility. The UK remains the largest source market, but its share eased, while Israel’s contribution increased materially and Germany edged higher. Many European countries such as Italy, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Austria and Poland, have exhibited double-digit increase in arrivals in 2025 compared to 2024. This rebalancing is constructive, reducing concentration at the margin without compromising headline growth. Crucially, air connectivity improved further with flight volumes to Cyprus have expanded significantly versus 2019 across all quarters, indicating larger airline capacity, stronger route coverage and better frequency—factors that support shoulder-season demand and make arrivals less dependent on a narrow set of peak-month flows.
Graph 2: Arrivals by nationality, 2018-2025
Source: Cystat, Eurobank Research
Graph 3: Arrivals by top-3 source countries (% of total arrivals)
Source: Eurostat, Eurobank Research
Risks are concentrated in structure rather than near-term momentum. The European Commission has introduced the “EU Tourism Dashboard” as a new monitoring tool to track tourism intensity, seasonality and source-market concentration, providing a common EU framework for identifying “unbalanced tourism” conditions and related vulnerabilities at country level. Cyprus retains high tourism intensity (measured as the number of nights spent at tourist accommodations by the resident population an indicator for potential overtourism) and still relies heavily on a small number of origin markets (see Graph 3), leaving earnings sensitive to geopolitical shocks or demand swings in key countries. Seasonality remains pronounced, keeping pressure on infrastructure, housing and labour during peak months, and straining resources (such as water) while also contributing to higher pollution levels. Targeted investment, product upgrading and continued market diversification remain key to resilience.
*Dr Konstantinos Vrachimis, Eurobank Research
