Tourist Accommodations in Belgium Recorded 39% More Overnight Stays in December Last Year Than in 2021
The Belgian statistical office has revealed that in December last year, the number of overnight stays in the country’s tourist accommodations was 2,760,034.
58 per cent of these tourists spent the night in hotels, 15 per cent in holiday homes and apartments and 14 per cent in holiday parks.
Compared to December 2021, the number of overnight stays in December 2022 was 39 per cent higher, with 1,986,277 nights spent, while at the same time, it was 320 per cent higher than in December 2020, with 656,750 nights spent and one per cent lower than in December 2019 with 2,780,760 occupied beds, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.
Based on these data, during December 2022, the Wallonia region recorded 527,256 overnight stays, which is an increase of 20 per cent and 236 per cent, respectively, compared to the same month of 2021 and 2020 and a decrease of three per cent compared to December 2019.
Meanwhile, during the same period in the Flemish Region, there were 1,632,790 occupied beds, which represents an increase of 35 per cent, 269 per cent and four per cent, respectively, compared to December 2021, 2020 and 2019.
As for the Brussels Capital Region, a total of 599,988 overnight stays were registered there. According to Belgian statistics, this figure shows an increase of 79 per cent and 948 per cent, respectively, compared to December 2021 and 2020. However, compared to December 2019, the Brussels-Capital region recorded a decrease of ten per cent.
Previously, the figures provided by the Belgian statistics office, StatBel, showed that in April 2022, the number of nights spent in Belgian tourist accommodations increased to 3,871,283.
The same source noted that nationally the majority of overnight stays were in hotels, or a total of 41 per cent, followed by holiday homes and apartments at 20 per cent and holiday centres and villages at 14 per cent respectively.
Further StatBel figures have also revealed that during April last year, the number of overnight stays increased by 120 per cent compared to the same month in 2021 (1,762) and by a total of 8,614 per cent compared to April 2020 (44,426).
Moreover, during the last year, Belgian citizens began to travel more compared to the period when the spread of COVID-19. As a result, tourism in Belgium also had a positive result as the country in the second quarter of 2022, a total of 81,705 passengers travelled through Antwerp airport in Belgium.
According to the airport data, this means that 97.5 per cent of the number of passengers who flew through this airport in the second quarter of 2019 before the start of the pandemic has recovered.
