Slight growth for hotel industry

Hotels are recovering well this year. A slight increase of 2 per cent is expected next year too. The slight growth, despite pressure on purchasing power, is due to lean figures in first quarter of 2022 against which 2023 is benchmarked. Moreover, tourists from America and Asia are expected to continue returning.

Asians are returning to more international travel as more and more Asian countries relax corona measures. For Americans, it is favourable to holiday in Europe due to the strong dollar. This is according to a poll on visitor expectations in 2023 by Amsterdam&Partners among their partners in Europe. However, this poll also revealed many uncertainties.

Occupancy rates and room rates are on the rise again, but hotels face a variety of obstacles. Staff shortages, rising energy and procurement costs, a limit on the number of flights to and from Schiphol Airport, deferred tax debts that must be repaid since 1 October 2022 and rising interest rates making investments relatively more expensive are playing tricks on hotels. Thereby, the speed of recovery varies by region and target group. Hotels in regions outside Amsterdam and Schiphol will benefit from tourists from home and neighbouring countries such as Germany and Belgium in 2023. At the same time, hotels in Amsterdam suffer from the slow recovery of inbound tourism and business guests.

Hotels are increasingly facing competition from flat landlords such as AirBnb and Booking.com. The corona pandemic has blurred the lines between home and office work and, with it, between business and leisure travel. People go away for longer and combine holidays with work more often. It is expected that business trips will more often be combined with a few days of leisure time - referred to as bleisure, the contraction of business and leisure - and holidays will be combined with work, or workcations, work and vacations. AirBnb says that a fifth of its revenue comes from bookings of stays longer than a month. Earlier, Booking.com's CEO revealed in Het Financieele Dagblad that a third of bookings involve stays other than hotels, such as flats.

Read the full report 'Shrinking leisure due to rising costs and declining purchasing power'.
Leisure sector forecasts (November 2022)