Olympic Games Hotels around Paris and in the provinces benefit from the Olympics

The Olympic Games in Paris have brought good business to hotels in the surrounding area in particular. The hoteliers in Paris themselves compensated for the lack of guests before the start of the Games.

In the center of the French capital, bookings from well-paying Olympic guests were offset by a lack of tourists in the weeks leading up to the Games, according to an analysis by the industry organization MKG. According to the analysis, hotels in the surrounding area, where some of the competition venues were located, recorded an increase in turnover of 200 million euros, while there was an increase of 92 million euros in the center of Paris.

In the run-up to the Games, the hotels in the heart of Paris had to cope with a 27 percent drop in turnover according to the survey. During the Olympic Games, however, occupancy was ten percent higher than in the previous year and prices were more than twice as high as usual, which more than compensated for the previous slump. In the end, the price increases for hotel rates were slightly higher than during the 2012 Olympic Games in London. However, they were within the usual range for major events.

Four times the turnover in Lille

According to MKG, the other venues in France benefited far more than Paris and the surrounding area. In Lille and Châteauroux, for example, sales quadrupled, while they were 50 percent higher in Aix-Marseille.

Unlike the hotels, which were able to compensate for the slump in sales around the Games with higher prices during the Olympics themselves, the restaurants fared differently. They were unable to compensate for the weaker weeks with fewer guests before the Games.

According to the tourism marketing organization Choose Paris Region, most foreign guests during the Games came from the USA, Canada, Spain, Germany and South Korea.

SDA