The Lithuanian capital saw the number of visitors rise by 8% in the first half of 2018 from a year earlier and the total number of overnight stays grow by 6.5% to almost a million, Go Vilnius, the city's tourism and business development and agency, said.

According to figures from Statistics Lithuania, a total of 536,900 visitors stayed at Vilnius' hotels and other accommodation establishments in the first half. The number of foreign guests rose by 6.2 % y-o-y to 429,700, or 80% of the total number.





The biggest numbers of tourists came from Belarus, Poland, Russia, Germany and Latvia.

The largest single increase was in the number of German visitors (up by 33 %), followed by British tourists (20.3%), Russians (12.9%), Latvians (12.1%) and Poles (12.1%). The number of visitors from Finland rose by 6.1% and that of Italian travelers was up by 5.9%.





However, the number of tourists from Belarus fell by 13.8% and that from the US edged down by 0.22%.





There were 70 hotels with around 5,600 rooms in total in Vilnius in late June, with their average occupancy rate at 62.9%.