The latest figures from KSH seem to back up hotel industry representatives’ call for a preferential VAT rate on hotel room prices. Hungary’s national statistics office on Friday reported a 4.3% drop in guest numbers at Balaton hotels in the first four months of this year.
Over three-quarters of the 218,000 guests who visited Hungary’s number one holiday resort in January-April were nationals, with their numbers down almost 4% from the same period last year. The number of guests from abroad fell by nearly 6% during the same period.
Health and wellness resorts continue to draw a growing number of tourists from both within and outside the country as more than half of the guest nights and 68% of the nights spent by foreigners were at spa and wellness hotels in Zala county alone.
On average, foreigners spent 5.3 nights at Balaton compared to only 2.2 nights by Hungarians. The popularity of the “Hungarian sea” is still declining rapidly among Germans and Austrians with their numbers down by a sharp 20%. Meanwhile the number of tourists from Denmark, Bulgaria and the Netherlands surged seven to ninefold.