After a good first half of the year, the local tourism industry is already sounding the alarm: Swiss as well as guests from nearby countries have reacted to the bad weather in July and are increasingly travelling abroad.
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“The time of Swiss guest records in the pandemic is definitely over,” Switzerland Tourism Director Martin Nydegger told the media in Zurich on Thursday. The share of Swiss guests is decreasing again, competition from the south and the sea is back and in demand, he said. “And the recovery from abroad, from Europe and overseas, continues to take a lot of time.”
Even though the number of guests from distant markets is steadily increasing here, we are not yet able to compensate with this guest segment,” said Monika König, Head of Marketing & Communication, Aletsch Arena, working on behalf of many mountain resorts. Many guests from abroad are still missing.
In the first half of the year, the number of overnight stays rose by 13.8% to 19.5 million compared to the previous year. So far, everything points to more guests staying in Swiss hotels this year than ever before. Even when comparing to the Swiss record and also 2019, pre-Covid-19 year, after six months there have been 3.6% more overnight stays.
However, foreign tourists are not yet back to the same extent as prior to the pandemic: foreign guests accounted for 9.4 million overnight stays in the first half of the year. Overseas tourists in particular are still lagging behind with a drop of 10%.
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