How much does the average European household spend on holidays per year?

How to get close to this number

Take a share of household spending. The explanation gives holidays at around five percent of total household expenditure, and a European household spends somewhere around forty thousand euros a year. Five percent of that gives a figure in the low thousands.

Five percent is lower than most people would guess, and the reason is that the average includes households that take no holiday at all. Discretionary spending categories always have a large zero-spending group, which pulls the mean well below what an actual holidaying household spends.

The national pattern in the explanation is the useful detail: one country takes more but shorter trips than the EU average, and mostly domestically. Holiday spending depends on distance travelled far more than on frequency, so a country with good weather and a large domestic coastline spends less per trip while travelling more often.