Foreign tourists are worth half the market. Guests with a quick wallet, capable of spending double what Italians do abroad, the Bank of Italy has reconstructed by analyzing the data from the beginning of the season. But now that we are at the halfway point, those vacationers who arrive from Europe and the Americas, but also from Asia and Australia, are being looked at carefully also in Sardinia, in yet another packed Ferragosto, with almost 600 thousand transits in the three airports of Cagliari, Olbia and Alghero .

At Mameli airport , compared to the 4 million and 160 thousand seats offered in this 2024 season, 1 million and 350 thousand are on international flights. That is, 32 percent . At Olbia's Costa Smeralda, in August alone, non-domestic market flows recorded a 15 percent growth compared to 2023. The record of 2019, the year before the pandemic, was also shattered: it had been golden, tourism-wise, but from abroad it marked a -9 percent compared to this August.

Germans represent the first market in Sardinia (23.32% of the total) . It has been like this for years. But at the Costa Smeralda – they explain from the Olbia port – the English market is the one that is growing the most .

At Mameli in Cagliari, behind the Teutonic holidaymakers are the Spanish, in turn ahead of the English . The list continues with the French, Swiss, Polish, Belgian, Austrian and Maltese.

And if German tourists are also a catch-all in the Nuoro and Oristano areas, the return of Americans to Sardinia is a novelty of the past season and a consolidated fact of this 2024. The star-spangled vacationers by far prefer Northern Sardinia, with arrivals double compared to the Cagliari airport and almost all concentrated in Gallura. In 2023 the proportion was 38,197 arrivals in the northern part of the island and 14,025 in Cagliari. The second non-European market is made up of Canadians, third place for Argentines.