The hotel industry outside Stockholm is now back to pre-pandemic levels, according to new figures released by the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce via the Benchmarking Alliance. Revenues are increasing rapidly as hotel guests increase in volume.

Revenues for hotels in Sweden, outside Stockholm County, are now back at exactly the same level in March 2022 as in the corresponding month in 2019. For Swedish hotels as a whole, accommodation revenues were 9 percent lower than the figures in March 2019. The corresponding level for hotels located in Stockholm County was -22 percent.

– This is good news. The trend is clearly positive and long-awaited after a very long period of weak revenues. The industry is coming out of a long-term crisis and is still very fragile, but right now there is reason to look towards the summer with hope in our eyes, says Stefan Westerberg, Chief Economist at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. 

In Sweden, total accommodation revenue was SEK 1,473 million for March 2022. This compares to only SEK 545 million in March 2021. Hotels in Stockholm received a total of SEK 497 million in accommodation, compared to SEK 142 million in March 2021. This is an increase of 250 percent. For hotels outside Stockholm County, accommodation revenue amounted to SEK 976 million in March 2022, compared to SEK 403 million in the same month last year.

– Stockholm is a little behind in the recovery. This is a natural consequence of limited international travel, especially from longer-distance tourists and business travelers who constitute an important part of Stockholm's tourism industry. But the development is clearly going in the right direction. In the longer term, it is important to develop Stockholm and Sweden as an attractive tourist destination. This includes investing in more and better air connections and developing Arlanda and Arlanda's surrounding infrastructure. The competition for foreign tourists is fierce, says Stefan Westerberg.