Prague is crying, Slovakia is full. The new figures show where tourists have gone
Hoteliers in nine of the fourteen regions can be satisfied, the occupancy of their facilities during the first holiday month was even better than before covid in 2019. Also, reservations for the following months do not look as tragic as a year ago, when there were already cases of coronavirus infection.
However, the metropolis is in need.
Data from reservation books for July in more than a thousand hotels was provided to the editors of SZ Byznys by the company Previo.
“The nationwide occupancy for this July broke the record. In a year-on-year comparison with 2020, it was three percentage points higher and returned to the pre-Covid level. According to information from accommodation providers, the demand for accommodation is still driven primarily by Czechs,” says Pavel Kotas, founder of Previo.
It is primarily a picture of how smaller and medium-sized hotels and guesthouses are doing. The reservation system does not offer the capacity of large multinational chains such as the CPI Hotels group, Orea and others, which target larger cities, foreign clientele and congress tourism. It is these hotels that are worse off, because foreigners are still missing from the traditional composition of guests.
Even though Germans and Poles are starting to travel a bit, the destinations where domestic tourists are heading have mainly improved. But from September, occupancy starts to fall again.
According to Previo data, hotels in Prague were not even half full in July last year. This year, they report an occupancy rate of 57 percent, ten percentage points higher. Nevertheless, they can only remember the golden era before the pandemic, when Prague was the destination with the highest occupancy ever.
However, the President of the Association of Hotels and Restaurants Václav Stárek says that large hotels clearly predominate in the metropolis, and if they were to be counted, the actual occupancy would be between 20 and 30 percent at most.
“Even though Germans and Poles are starting to travel a bit, the destinations where domestic tourists are heading have mainly improved. But from September, occupancy will start to fall again,” says Stárek. According to him, it is still true that people prefer smaller establishments, for example boarding houses. “On the contrary, our estimate for this year is worse than what we had at the beginning of this year. Overall, we could get 30 to 35 percent in cities and 70 percent outside,” he added.
In addition to Prague, the operators of smaller hotels were still below the 2019 level in the Karlovy Vary region, the Pilsen region, the Central Bohemian region and the Ústí region.
And where did it succeed? The absolute winner of the hunt for tourists was the Zlín region. With 72 percent occupancy, it became a record holder and overtook the popular South Bohemian and wine tourist paradises. It also significantly improved compared to the pre-Covid year 2019, when regional accommodation facilities were “only” 60 percent full.
Vysočina, the Olomouc Region and the Pardubický Region mined significantly during the pandemic. It is there that the number of tourists, or rather the occupancy in the investigated hotels, is increasing at the highest rate. However, it still attracts less attention than South Bohemia and South Moravia.
From a more detailed look at the occupancy of hotels in specific tourist locations, it can be read that about half of the destinations improved compared to last year, but also compared to 2019. Vysočina (12 and 13 percent) and Ostrava also grew strongly in two consecutive years of covid. (8 to 13 percent). Today, they can therefore be classified as destinations where hotel capacities are at their busiest.
Covid changes the odds of where a tourist can find accommodation most easily. Smaller and medium-sized hotels in Slovácko were the most occupied in July this year, where on average the rooms were 79 percent full. But this does not mean that the tourist got a stay in an attractive period, because the capacity was not available at any time, but for example only on some less popular days.
After Slovakia, hotels in Ostrava – Silesia and the Moravian Karst and Brno are leading in terms of hotel occupancy. Accommodation providers had the most free capacities in the Ore Mountains (48.8 percent occupancy), but also in Šumava and the České les. At the same time, these South Bohemian destinations were still among the most exposed in 2019. However, Šumava and Český les are still 18 percent below 2019.
Mountain areas have also improved significantly compared to pre-covid times. There were fewer free rooms in the Jizera Mountains than in the Krkonoše Mountains, but compared to 2019, there was a big leap forward of 22 percent. They also had no shortage of guests in the Beskydy and Wallachia.
Two years in a row, however, occupancy has fallen in the Ore Mountains, where there is the most space. The Lusatian Mountains were also emptier.
The entries in the reservation books also provide a relatively promising outlook for the coming months. The average occupancy for August is currently eight percentage points higher than last year and even ten percentage points since September.
“We believe that, compared to previous trends, the home season will be extended into the autumn months as well. At the same time, we expect a continuation of the trend of increasing the number of domestic reservations in advance,” says Pavel Kotas from Previa.