Tourism generated €87.5bn for the Dutch economy last year, but well over the half the total derived from locals holidaying at home or on day trips, national statistics agency CBS said on Wednesday.

‘Tourism is now almost as important as construction and IT,’ CBS chief economist Piet Hein van Mulligen told NOS news. ‘It is becoming more varied and that makes our economic fundamentals stronger.’

Some €50bn on the total was due to domestic tourism, largely due to the long, hot summer in 2018, the CBS said. Belgians and Germans were the two biggest groups of foreign tourists. In total, tourism-generated income rose 6.4%.

The bulk of the money was spent on hotels, cafes and bars and the hospitality industry also accounted for most of the 27,000 new jobs, Van Mulligen said. In total some 790,000 jobs now depend on tourism.

Despite the importance of tourism to the economy, Amsterdam in particular, is trying to take action to stem the tourist flow. Hotel stays in the capital rose 12.5% in the first four months of this year and city centre residents say the area is becoming uninhabitable because of the sheer volume of visitors.

Nationwide

Earlier this year, the Dutch tourist board said it is trying to spread the flow of visitors to the rest of the country.

The organisation expects at least 29 million tourists will visit the Netherlands a year by 2030, compared with 19 million in 2018.

Last year it developed the HollandCity strategy which involves promoting the Netherlands as a single metropolis with lots of districts, such as Lake District Friesland and Design District Eindhoven.

This Easter, the Keukenholf bulb garden and the Kinderdijk windmill district were impossible to reach for a time because so many people had turned out to visit them.