Hungarian Tourism Hit Hard by Border Closure

Statistical figures published this Friday confirm what those involved in tourism have already experienced: as a result of the pandemic, aggravated by closing the country’s borders on September 1, international tourists spent 91% fewer tourism nights in commercial accommodation establishments in this country compared to the same period of the previous year.

As the first wave of the epidemic subsided, both domestic and foreign tourism started to grow in the summer. However, this trend was broken by the second wave of the coronavirus epidemic as far as foreign tourists were concerned.

Smaller decline in domestic tourism
The only positive development seen in data by the Central Statistical Office is that the number of domestic tourism nights (that accounted for 88% of the total figure) in September this year came close to the figure registered a year before – this figure was only 16% lower than in the ninth month of 2019. Total gross sales revenues declined by 65% at current prices in commercial accommodation establishments.

According to the report, 35,000 guests spent 130,000 tourism nights in accommodation establishments this September. Despite the fact that most guests stayed in hotels, the number of nights spent there decreased to less than a tenth compared to September 2019. The decline was more than 80% in bungalow complexes, camping sites, boarding houses and community hostels. Budapest recorded the largest, 96%, downturn.

Popular camping sites
401,000 domestic guests (a 24% decrease) spent 931,000 tourism nights (a 16% decrease). Of the five types of commercial accommodation, only camping sites registered more tourism nights than in the same month of the previous year, where the increase was 33%. Six out of ten nights were spent in hotels, where the rate of growth was 2.8%. 21% fewer nights were registered in boarding houses and 18% fewer in bungalow complexes. Seven out of ten nights were spent in hotels, where the rate of decline was 14%. The turnover in community hostels was slightly more than half of the turnover in September of the previous year. Lake Balaton was the most popular tourist region.