Atout France estimates that France welcomed 102 million international visitors in 2025, enough to retain its place as the world’s most-visited country. Spain’s National Statistics Institute, meanwhile, provisionally recorded 96.8 million visitors, leaving a gap of about 5.2 million arrivals. Those figures place France and Spain closer together than they were in the 2019 baseline used by the joint Deloitte and Google study behind the 2040 forecast.
France received 90.9 million international visitors that year, compared with Spain’s 83.5 million, giving France a lead of 7.4 million. First published in 2024, the long-range forecast has drawn new attention after Time Out reported on it this month. The report predicts nearly 1 billion additional international trips by 2040 and examines how changes in income, travel frequency, technology, and other factors could affect where those visitors go.
Spain Projected To Lead Global Tourism With 110 Million Visitors
Based on that model, Deloitte and Google project Spain will receive 110 million international arrivals in 2040, ahead of France at 105 million and the United States at 100 million. Both France and Spain would continue gaining visitors, but Spain would add 26.5 million arrivals from the study’s 2019 baseline, compared with 14.1 million for France. The ranking measures international arrivals rather than tourism revenue, so visitor spending does not determine who lands in first place.
Researchers built the forecast from billions of Google searches covering travel-planning behavior across 230 geographic markets, along with more than 90,000 tourism data points from sources including UN Tourism and Gapminder. The team used an XGBoost predictive model for international arrivals and selected about 20 variables based on their ability to explain tourism flows. The report notes that it excluded political stability and natural events because of the uncertainty surrounding them.
Europe is projected to capture 362 million of the additional international arrivals, more than any other region. Even so, the combined share held by the five leading destinations could fall from 30% in 2019 to 20% in 2040 as tourism expands across more countries, according to the study.
France Still Leads As Spain’s Tourism Growth Continues
France’s current lead continues to generate record tourism income. International tourism receipts reached €77.5 billion ($90.2 billion) in 2025, bringing the country closer to its €100 billion ($116.4 billion) target by 2030. France also aims to become the world’s leading sustainable tourism destination by the end of the decade. “France is a great tourism country. Let us be proud of it and, above all, remain one,” Serge Papin, the minister responsible for tourism, said in a translated French government statement.
Spain, meanwhile, provisionally recorded €134.7 billion ($156.8 billion) in spending by international tourists in 2025, up 6.8%. That EGATUR figure measures tourist expenditure, while France’s €77.5 billion comes from balance-of-payments tourism receipts, so the totals are not directly comparable. The French government separately placed Spain’s international tourism receipts at €105 billion ($122.3 billion) in 2025. That growth continued during the first half of 2026, when provisional data showed that international arrivals in Spain rose 4.6% to nearly 46.6 million. Tourist spending over those six months climbed 7% to € 63.8 billion ($74.3 billion).
The study gives no precise year for Spain’s projected move into first place, only that it expects the change by 2040. Visitor numbers would continue rising in both countries, with Spain growing fast enough to overtake France. As a modeled estimate, the ranking could change as international travel patterns develop.
