Official figures show that Budapest is more popular than ever before. According to statistics just released by the Budapest Festival and Tourist Center (BFTK), a record ten million hotel stays were recorded in the Hungarian capital over the course of 2017. It’s the first time that this figure has broken the ten-million barrier. Events and attractions such as the Sziget music festival, Hungarian Grand Prix and Christmas markets have all helped to drive this record traffic, along with the 2017 FINA World Aquatics Championships held over two weeks last July.

From January to December 2017, an official 10,000,678 hotel stays were recorded in Budapest by 4,283,643 guests. Of these, almost 90% were foreign.

As has been the case every year since 2013, more visitors came from the United Kingdom than anywhere else, followed by the United States, Germany, Italy and Spain. With 646,000 guest nights from Germany alone, Budapest has never seen so many German visitors over the course of one year.

Further down the list come France, Russia, Israel, China and The Netherlands. Asia was responsible for 13.5% of the overall total – interestingly, guest nights by citizens of Asia exceeded those by Hungarians from outside Budapest.

China is seen as a growing market, with far more independent travelers arriving than in the past, when tour groups were the norm.

By far the most popular quarter for visitors to stay was downtown district V, way ahead of the party zone of district VII. Nearly 30% more people stayed in gentrifying district IX, Ferencváros, than in 2016.

In overall terms, the number of annual guest nights in Budapest has increased nearly three-and-a-half times since the global economic crisis of 2008.