Figures from the accommodation statistics show that there were 2,3 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 March. There were 957 000 more Norwegian guest nights and 413 000 more foreign guest nights than in March last year.
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 14,7 per cent from February 2022 to March 2022.
In March, there were a total of 1.8 million guest nights stays in hotels, an increase of 1,2 million compared to March last year. Norwegian guest nights increased by 933 000.
There were 328 000 foreign guest nights stays in hotels, an increase of 261 000 compared to March last year.
Guest nights at hotels increased across all counties in March this year compared to March last year. The largest increases were in Oslo and Troms and Finnmark.
Increase in foreign guest nights
There were 507 000 foreign overnight stays in all commercial accommodation establishments in March this year, more than five times as many as in March last year. Adjusted for seasonal variations, it is the highest number of overnight stays since March 2020.
The number of foreign guest nights is almost back to the same level as in the years before the pandemic. In 2018 and 2019, there were respectively 560 000 and 571 000 foreign overnight stays in March.
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 March. For accommodation establishments that have more than 25 guest nights from Ukraine during March, 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 actions 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 the accommodation pattern since March 2020 compared to 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 (from March 2020), are not included in the calculation of the seasonal pattern. Technically, in the seasonal adjustment routine, this is done by specifying March and following months as outliers. This means that the smoothed seasonally adjusted and seasonal adjusted figures will follow each other. One important exception is the last observation, where the smoothed adjusted figure is only a projected value and the last observation is therefore not included. The smoothed adjusted figures from March 2020 will therefore be difficult to interpret. The seasonal adjustment routine of Statistics Norway is in line with the recommendations of Eurostat