Figures from the accommodation statistics show that there were 2,4 million notice the difference between “guest nights” and “guest”. One guest may have several guest nights at the numbers refer to hotels, short-term holiday dwellings, camping sites, and youth hostels. in April. That’s almost 1.5 million more guest nights than April last year, an increase of 167 per cent.
After two years with travel restrictions in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of guest nights has increased to the same level as before the pandemic.
The The number of overnight stays varies during the year and the pattern is repeated every year. Seasonal adjustment is used to remove what we call seasonal variations, such as public holidays from monthly time series. The adjustment removes the effects of these fluctuations, giving a clearer picture of the time series. show an increase of 4,4 per cent from March 2022 to April 2022. When we look at the seasonally adjusted figures, we see that the number of foreign guest nights has been low throughout the pandemic. Norwegian guest nights have varied more with peaks in the summer months during the pandemic and are now back to the same level as before.
Sharp increase in hotel guest nights
There was a total of 1.7 million guest nights registered at hotels in April, more than three times more than the same month last year. This is the highest number recorded by Statistics Norway for April. There were 974 000 more Norwegian guest nights and 210 000 more foreign overnight stays at hotels compared to April last year.
Guest nights at hotels increased across all counties in April this year compared to April last year. The largest increases were in Oslo and Viken
In April, there were a total of 347 000 guest nights stays at campingsites, a doubling compared to April las year. There were 300 000 guest nights stays at holiday dwellings and youth hostels, an increase of 137 per cent.
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 at are included in the statistics for April. For accommodation establishments that have more than 25 guest nights from Ukraine during April, the guest nights have been removed from the statistic. Establishments that are exclusively hosting refugees are not included in the statistics.
Seasonally adjusted figures for accommodation statistics were first introduced with the publication of the January 2022 statistics. Monthly time series are often characterized by considerable seasonal variations, which might complicate their interpretation. Seasonal adjustment removes the effects of these fluctuations, giving a clearer picture of the time series
The Norwegian government introduced measures against the spreading of the Corona-virus in Norway on Thursday 12th of March 2020. This has severely affected the accommodation industry and has led to a change in the accommodation pattern. From March 2020 until the restrictions were lifted in February 2022 the pattern was different from what we usually observe. The seasonal adjustment routine during the Corona-crisis is done in such a way that the figures from the start of and during the crisis, are not included in the calculation of the seasonal pattern. Technically, in the seasonal adjustment routine, this is done by specifying March 2020 until Mach 2022 as outliers. This means that the smoothed seasonally adjusted and seasonal adjusted figures will follow each other from March 2020 until Mach 2022. The smoothed adjusted figures from this period will therefore be difficult to interpret. The seasonal adjustment routine of Statistics Norway is in line with the recommendations of Eurostat