No sales recovery
Hospitality caught in the Corona hole
01/18/2022, 10:12 am
The year in hospitality once again reflects the course of the pandemic. It starts mau. As the situation eases, revenues will increase in the summer. Then Delta and at the end Omikron once again cut a path on the revenue side.
Despite a temporary increase in sales, the German hospitality industry was unable to recover from the corona-related slump of the previous year. However, there was no further decline in revenue and the industry stabilized. In the end, hotels, pubs and restaurants made the same price-adjusted sales as in the previous year 2020, which was characterized by the corona pandemic, as reported by the Federal Statistical Office. After enormous losses in winter and spring, sales in the industry increased significantly in summer. Although they fell again at the end of the year, they remained well above the values from the lockdown in November and December 2020.
Nominally – i.e. not price-adjusted – sales increased by two percent for the year as a whole. “This means that the years 2020 and 2021 were the weakest in terms of sales since the time series began in 1994,” said the Federal Office. Compared to the pre-crisis year of 2019, the hospitality industry turned over a good 40 percent less in real terms and almost 36 percent less in nominal terms in 2021. The information is based on the sales figures for the months of January to November and an estimate for the month of December, which according to the Federal Office “assumes a drop in sales due to the introduction of 2G rules”.
Viewed over the year, the hospitality industry has been able to significantly increase its sales since the relaxation of the corona measures in May 2021 “after the enormous sales declines in spring”. For November, however, the statisticians recorded a price-adjusted decline of 12.5 percent compared to the previous month. “The decline in sales is likely to be due to the increasing incidence figures since the end of October and a tightened corona regulation at the end of November,” explained the Federal Office.
In November 2021 compared to October 2021, hotels and other accommodation companies recorded a real drop in sales of 14.8 percent. In gastronomy, price-adjusted sales fell by 11.1 percent month-on-month.