New figures from the accommodation statistics show that there were almost 1.8 million guest nights at Norwegian hotels in November 2023. Norwegians had 22 000 fewer guest nights compared to November 2022, while there were 36 000 more foreign guest nights. Overall, this resulted in a marginal increase in hotel guest nights by 0.8 percent.
In November 2023, the number of foreign guest nights at hotels was just below 306 000. This marks the first instance where the Norwegian accommodation statistics has recorded over 300 000 foreign guest nights at Norwegian hotels, for the month of November.
The last time Norwegians spent fewer nights at hotels in November, was in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Excluding 2020, one must go back to 2018 to find a lower number of Norwegian hotel guest nights for this month.
– Weakened krone gave foreign visitors more purchasing power and is presumably an important factor for the increased number of foreigners staying at Norwegian hotels. The combination of escalating prices and rising interest rates this year, has reduced the purchasing power of many Norwegians, which in turn may have led to reduced hotel guest nights by Norwegians – says senior advisor Guro Henriksen to SSB.
In accordance with definitions from Eurostat, refugees should be excluded from tourism statistics and not be considered as guests in the context of tourism statistics when they stay at a tourist accommodation establishment. Refugees from Ukraine cannot be assigned by purpose as holiday, occupation or course, conference. It was not possible to extract all refugees guest nights and some stays are included in the statistics. For accommodation establishments that have more than 25 guest nights from Ukraine during the month, the guest nights have been removed from the statistic. Establishments that are exclusively hosting refugees are not included in the statistics.