Record number of hotel room nights in summer 2024
Keystone-SDA
Hotel occupancy in Switzerland rose during the summer season. Between May and the end of October, the number of overnight stays reached a record level of 24.4 million, 1.6% up on the same period last year, thanks to foreign demand.
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With an increase of 3.9% to 13 million overnight stays, foreign demand outstripped domestic demand, which fell by 0.8% to 11.4 million during the summer season, according to provisional figures from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO) published on Thursday. Foreign demand even exceeded that recorded in summer 2019 by 1.2%.
Americans accounted for a large proportion of this demand, with a 13.5% increase to 3 million overnight stays, marking the best result since 1985. The guests from Asia also posted a strong increase to 2.9 million (+5.9%). Only European demand declined by 0.4% to 6.6 million.
The tourist season was marked by severe weather, particularly in the mountains and in Ticino. Despite this, and with the exception of a 1.4% drop in September, the following months saw an increase, with a 0.3% rise in October, as the tourist office points out.
In terms of overnight stays since the start of the year, the increase was 1.7% on the same period a year earlier, to 37 million by the end of October.
The FSO predicts that the record number of overnight stays will be exceeded for the year as a whole. By 2023, the Swiss hotel industry will have recorded a total of 41.8 million overnight stays.
Translated from German by DeepL/jdp
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