Winter cheer for Swiss hotel industry

Deep snow and low prices have brought good news for the Swiss hotel industry. It has seen an increase in trade for January of four per cent over the same time last year.

Deep snow and low prices have brought good news for the Swiss hotel industry. It has seen an increase in trade for January of four per cent over the same time last year.

The federal statistics office said it was the third year in a row that there had been a rise in the January figures. The office said the results were all the more impressive because the New Year public holidays had fallen on a weekend, which normally meant a drop in bookings.

The results also reversed the previous month’s trend, when the hotel industry reported a drop of 2.3 per cent in the number of nights booked.

The figures showed that there were 101,000 more overnight stays in Swiss hotels in January this year, compared with January 1999. The total number of stays for the month rose to 2.65 million.

There was increase in the number of guests from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the United States and Britain. However, fewer French nationals and Japanese came to stay in Switzerland.

There was also strong demand from the Swiss. The domestic demand was up 3.8 per cent in January.

From staff and wire reports