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Romania is the EU state with the highest share of people who can’t afford a one-week annual holiday
Even though an increasing number of Romanians travel either within the country’s borders or abroad every year, especially during the summer, fresh Eurostat data show that Romania is the EU country which had the largest proportion of the population aged over 16 who was unable to afford a one-week annual holiday away from home in 2018 (58.9 percent) – over twice the EU average of 28.3 percent.
After Romania, the countries in the EU with the largest share of people who couldn’t afford a one-week holiday per year were Croatia (51.3 percent – provisional data), Greece (51 percent), and Cyprus (51 percent – provisional data).
At the other end of the spectrum, the countries with the lowest population shares not being able to take a week-long holiday annually were Sweden (9.7 percent), Luxembourg (10.9 percent), and Denmark (12.2 percent).
Romania’s neighbor Bulgaria did much better, with only 30.5 percent of its population being in this situation. Bulgaria recorded the largest fall in the population who couldn’t afford a one-week annual holiday away from home since 2013 (down 35.8 percentage points since 2013 to 30.5 percent in 2018), followed by Poland (down 26 percentage points since 2013 to 34.6 percent in 2018).
The share of people who had this issue in Romania fell every year over the past five years, but at rather slow rates: from 72.2 percent in 2013 to 58.9 percent in 2018.
Greece was the only EU Member State in which the proportion increased over the same five-year period, up 2 percentage points to 51.0 percent in 2018.