In a year of recovery from the corona crisis, domestic tourism records were broken, and foreign tourism was on the rise.

In 2022, 2.675 million tourist entries were recorded in Israel, about 41 percent lower than 2019, a record year.

Only 397,000 tourists entered in 2021 and 831,000 in 2020 – the two years most negatively affected by closures due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The skies in Israel were opened officially to incoming tourism in March 2022 and all remaining restrictions were lifted in May.

The Ministry of Tourism notes that Israel’s recovery rate from the crisis is slightly lower than the global average of about 36% decrease in the volume of incoming tourism relative to 2019.

However, the gap is closing. In December 2022, 266,200 tourist entries were recorded (compared with 20,500 in December 2021 and 358,300 in December 2019), a decrease of only about 25% in relation to December 2019.

The most December tourists (136,100) came from western and northern Europe, with the highest numbers from France and Italy, followed by North America (96,900).

Revenue from incoming tourism in 2022 totaled about 13.5 billion shekels ($3.8 billion) as opposed to about 23 billion shekels ($6.6 billion) in 2019. These numbers do not include airline revenues.

Domestic tourism hit new highs in 2022, with more than 20 million overnight stays booked by Israeli citizens. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, that number stood at 18.4 million.