Almost half of Spanish hotels remain closed due to tourism restrictions
MADRID
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Overnight stays in hotels fell by 84.5% in November, from 18.3 million that month of 2019 to 2.8 million, and they deepen the fall of October. December will be, predictably, worse due to the effect of the suppression of flights with the United Kingdom after the appearance of a mutation of the coronavirus, more contagious.
The Hotel Tourism Situation Survey published this Tuesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) reflects that in November the number of open hotels decreased compared to October by more than 2,000, from 10,597 to 8,189, 38.7% less than a year earlier and represent only 50.4% of the total plant.
In the first eleven months of the year 88.4 million overnight stays were recorded, 72.9% less than in this period last year, when 326 million nights were booked.
Overnight stays had fallen by 83.3% in October, a sharp decline in November, to 84.5%. With the foreseeable additional cut in December - due to the situation in the United Kingdom - the number of nights that will be consumed in 2020 will not even reach the 112 million that had been used last year between January and May.
From 6.7 million travelers who registered in Spanish hotels in November 2019, this last November has risen to 1.17 million.
For December the data will be even worse: in that month of 2019 6.24 million people were registered, an unthinkable amount this year given the practical closure of the British market, the traditional leading source of tourists to Spain (although with the pandemic the first position is occupied by France).
The number of travelers for all of 2020 will not even reach a third of the 108.6 million registered in 2019, given that 33 million have been registered as of November.
The decrease was greater among non-resident tourism, 81.4% in January-November (39.7 million), than among nationals, which decreased the number of hotel nights consumed by 56.7% (48.7 million ).
The Canary Islands, Madrid and Andalusia were the main destinations in November, although all of them with cuts of over 80%. For residents, the main destination was Madrid (303,000 overnight stays, 17% of the total), and for foreigners, the Canary Islands (611,000 overnight stays, 57.6% of those by non-residents).
Travelers from Germany and the United Kingdom concentrated 23.5% and 19.8%, respectively, of all non-resident stays in hotel establishments in November, but with falls of around 90% in both cases.
The average stay was reduced by 11.3% compared to a year ago and stood at 2.4 nights per person.
In November, 15.7% of the available places were covered, the same occupancy ratio as in the weekend, far from values higher than 50% a year earlier. The highest occupancy rates were in the Canary Islands (24.2%) and Ceuta (23.6%).
Price's drop
Travel restrictions have forced the sector to lower prices to try to attract low demand: in November they fell by 17.4%, the largest decrease in the series since these data were collected in 2002.
By category, the biggest drop was in the three- and two-star silver hotels (-20%) and the least, in the two-star hotels (-10.3%).
All the communities lowered their prices in November: those with the most, Catalonia and Madrid (28.5% each) and the Basque Country (24.8%), and those with the least - in addition to the autonomous cities of Melilla (4.7 %) and Ceuta (6.7%) -, Galicia (7.4%) and Canarias (8.8%).
The average daily turnover of hotels for each occupied room (ADR, in English) was 63.9 euros in November, which represents a decrease of 23.5% compared to the same month in 2019.
The average daily income per available room (RevPAR, in English), which is the best indicator of the sector's efficiency and is conditioned by occupancy, stood at 13.7 euros, with a drop of 72.7% over the 50 , 2 euros a year before.
In line with the sharp drop in occupancy, electricity consumption in the tourism sector fell by 56.6% in November, according to data from Red Eléctrica (REE).
