If you’re staying at a hotel during the Christmas holidays, you won’t miss this: the bill will seem particularly steep. Rates in the hotel industry have experienced spectacular increases since January. The average price of a room reaches 107 euros in 2022, a figure 27% higher than that observed during the year 2021, according to the latest figures from the firm MKG, which aggregates data from the French hotel sector.
If this increase concerns all categories, the increase is even more marked in the high end and luxury. Another trend is emerging: it is in Paris that prices have soared the most, with prices 42% higher than in 2021. In the capital, it is necessary to count 148 euros on average per night. Conversely, hotels in the provinces have increased “only” by 13% in one year.
For hotel owners, this price increase is above all a way of making up for the shortfall of the years of the Covid-19 pandemic. “There is a desire in the sector to regain room for maneuver after two mediocre years”, observes Stéphane Durand, director of the firm Voltere, which specializes in the hotel industry. Faced with the disappearance of a large part of their clientele in 2020 and 2021, hoteliers had significantly lowered room prices during these lean years.
holiday appetite
The fact remains that if we compare to 2019, before the pandemic, the prices still increased by 13%, i.e. twice as much as inflation over the same period. Furnished tourist accommodation is following the same trend: the daily rate for a furnished rental on the Airbnb site has increased by 28% since November 2019, according to data from the firm AirDNA.
If hotels have been able to boost their rates this year, it is because customers are returning, especially European tourists and Americans, attracted by the favorable exchange rate. Admittedly, the reservation books have not quite returned to their 2019 levels. But, in Paris, the hotels, almost empty in 2021, still record occupancy rates of 75% (compared to 35% in 2021 and 81% in 2019), according to MKG data. Hoteliers like to talk about “revenge travel”, this appetite for holidays and travel after years of restrictions.
Business travellers, with the resumption of congresses and trade fairs, have also contributed to filling the rooms again, even if part of this clientele has evaporated. “Business tourism is changing. People travel less, but longer, and combine work and weekends more easily, explains Vanguelis Panayotis, from MKG. It is estimated that 15% of this segment has disappeared with new post-Covid uses, and will probably not return. »
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