ČSÚ: Growth in Czech hotel stays slows, number of US, French tourists up

Photo: Alan, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The number of hotel guests rose by 3.1 percent year-on-year to 17.3 million people from January through September, with Czechs accounting for 9 million of that figure, according to the Czech Statistical Office (ČSÚ).

Photo: Alan,  Flickr,  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Pavel Vančura, head of the Services Statistics Department, told a news conference on Friday that hotels and pensions have accommodated a steadily rising number of guests since 2012, but this year the rate has slowed.

Some 8.3 million foreigners booked such accommodation in the first three quarters of 2019, up 2.6 percent from the same period last year. Germans comprised the largest group of foreign guests, at more than 1.6 million.

“Germans made up around 19 percent of all foreign visitors, and in the case of overnight stays the share is even greater,” Vančura said, ČTK reported.

The ČSÚ data also show a significant jump in the number of French visitors, he said, with their numbers up more than 10 percent in annual terms.

While Russians rank sixth in terms of the number of accommodated guests, they rank second in the number of overnight stays. “It can be inferred that guests from Russia stay here longer than other foreign visitors do," Vančura said.

Since January, the number of tourists from China, the United States and Poland has been increasing, while the number of British, Italian and South Korean visitors fell year-on-year.

Chinese tourist tend to spend fewer days in booked accommodation than do other nationalities, Vančura said, as many are doing European tours of a couple weeks and try to visit as many countries as possible in that time.

According to ČTK, there are 9,403 collective accommodation establishments in the Czech Republic, with most of them in the Jihočeský, Královéhradecký and Liberec regions, and a majority of them pensions and three-star hotels.