Three months before the start of the Olympic Games, only half of the rooms are filled.
As early as the end of 2023, reports began to appear that Paris hotels had significantly increased prices for the period of the Olympic Games from July 26 to August 11, 2024. A similar situation occurred with public transport and other tourist services.
However, as The Independent points out, in the end, greedy Parisian hoteliers were left without customers – three months before the start of the Olympics, only half of their rooms were filled. Now they had to lower prices.
Thus, the data of the analyst of the hotel market Lighthouse, which the publication has at its disposal, show a constant decrease in the cost of a night during the Olympics from more than 800 euros in September last year to less than 500 euros now. Only in the last 30 days, prices in three-star hotels fell by 9%, in four-star hotels – by 8%, and in five-star hotels – by 6%.
“Current market occupancy continues to hover around 50%, as it has for some time,” a Lighthouse representative noted.
A month earlier, The Independent reported that top tourism officials in Paris were expecting 60 to 70 percent hotel occupancy during the Games. For comparison, in July 2023, the average occupancy was 91%.
“We have 160,000 rooms in the Paris region, which is more than in London in 2012. So we have everything we need to accommodate everyone. We compare with the 2012 Games, where hotels in London were initially very expensive, and they had to lower prices,” said Paris Region Tourism Director General Christophe Decloux.
At the same time, he noted that the occupancy of the host city in 2012 recovered “as soon as the prices began to meet the real demand of customers.”
Meanwhile, overall hotel prices in Paris during the Olympics are still 95% higher than during the rest of 2024, according to Lighthouse.
The most expensive date for accommodation during the Games is the closing day of the competition on August 4, 2024, when the cost of a room in a five-star hotel will be 1,566 euros on average.
