Coronavirus severely affects accommodation business

The ongoing coronavirus situation hampered the accommodation business in the country severely in March.

According to Statistics Finland, the number of overnight stays by resident tourists at Finnish accommodation establishments in March posted a 46 per cent decline year on year.

A total of 0.70 million nights were recorded for them in the month.

Meanwhile, the number of overnight stays by foreign tourists marked a 53 per cent slide and 0.26 million overnight stays were recorded for non-resident tourists.

Finnish accommodation establishments recorded a total of 0.96 million overnight stays, which was 48 per cent lower than the corresponding figure one year earlier.

Forty-three per cent of the hotels that reported data for March said they had already closed before the end of the month. On an average, the closed hotels remained open for 24 days in March.

The biggest drop was seen in the number of overnight stays by Russians, down by 36,100 nights. Their overnight stays were 57.8 per cent down from that in March 2019.

The biggest group of non-resident tourists were Germans with 35,000 overnight stays. The second largest group was French with 30,500 overnight stays. The third largest group was Russians with 26,300 overnight stays, and the fourth was Dutch tourists with 17,800 overnight stays.

In March 2020, the realised average price of a hotel room was 113.95 euros a day for the whole country. Twelve months earlier, it was 110.85 euros.

In March, a total of 54,190 hotel rooms were available in Finland, 208 more than in March 2019.