A radiant season. According to INSEE figures published this Tuesday, the number of visitors to hotels and campsites between June and August 2022 exceeded its 2019 level by almost 3%, the last year before the Covid-19 crisis, with 176, 2 million overnight stays.
For the sector weighed down for months by health restrictions, this performance is a real relief. In part it is due to French tourists who seem to have been more numerous this year preferring “blue white red” holidays than in 2019.
This resident clientele also returned to commercial accommodation in the summer of 2022 (79.7 million overnight stays in July) to the detriment of vacations in second homes, with family or friends (62.5 million). And this while “until June 2022, resident tourists spent the night in both non-commercial accommodation and commercial accommodation, or even more outside the summer period.”
The 2022 summer season was also marked by the return of foreign tourists. Between June and August, the number of overnight stays of this clientele in hotels and campsites almost returned to the pre-crisis level (56 million, compared to 57.3 million in 2019). In detail, the Dutch, Germans and Belgians were even more numerous this year than three years ago. An increase in the number of European tourists that made it possible to compensate for the absence of travelers from China, Japan or Russia. To the point that even Ile-de-France, the region that had suffered the most from the crisis, recovered from June “the level of hotel frequentation of 2019”.
A false increase in spending by foreign customers
Between the summer of 2019 and the summer of 2022, spending by foreign tourists in France increased by 7%. At the same time, prices rose 13% in hotels and 8% in restaurant cafes. In other words, spending by foreign customers has increased less rapidly than inflation, which means that real spending by foreign customers, corrected for inflation, has decreased.
“This drop in volume is mainly due to the drop in total spending by tourists from China, and to a lesser extent from Japan and Russia, which is not offset by the increase in spending by travelers from Europe and the United States,” it specifies. INSEE.
For its part, the turnover of the accommodation and restaurant sectors increased by 22.9% in May, 17.3% in June and 13.9% in July compared to the same months of 2019, more than the rise in prices. An increase in activity in volume that INSEE attributes “to resident tourism, given the drop in foreign spending in volume.”
Source: BFM TV
