Floods, low season drive hotel occupancy rate down to 55% in Sept
Hotel industry yet to regain pre-pandemic levels, says association
Thailand’s average hotel occupancy rate in September contracted by 7 percentage points month on month due to the flood situation and the decline in foreign arrivals during the low tourism season, the Thai Hotels Association (THA) said on Thursday.
In collaboration with the Bank of Thailand, the THA has been surveying hotel operators nationwide to compile a monthly hospitality operators’ confidence index. In September, a survey among 88 operators revealed an average occupancy rate of 55%, dropping from 62% recorded in August.
The September occupancy rate was also lower than the 63.4% during the same period in 2019, showing that the hotel industry had yet to fully recover from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, THA president Thienprasit Chaiyapatranun said.
He added that the drop in occupancy is more stark in cheaper hotels – establishments ranked 3-star and lower had 44.9% occupancy on average, while 4-star hotels and higher reported an average 58.7% occupancy.
When divided by region, hotels in the North saw the biggest drop in occupancy, from 50% in August to 25.7% in September, due to the ongoing flood situation in several provinces. Hotels in the Central region reported the highest occupancy rate at 64.4%, followed by those in the Eastern region at 57.1%. Hotels in the Northeast and the South tied at 49% occupancy rate.
The survey also found that 35% of respondents planned to hike their room prices during the high season at the year-end. Most establishments in this group believed the price hike should not exceed 10%, except for 4-star hotels and higher, which planned to adjust between 10-20% from the current prices.
The THA estimated that the average occupancy rate in October would be at 55.6%, and the total hotel customer numbers in the fourth quarter of 2024 would increase by 5-10% year on year.
The majority of hotel operators believed that most of the increase in customers will come from countries other than China, while Chinese and Thai customers in the fourth quarter will be roughly at the same level as the previous year.
