How big is the European hotel market for a startup selling to hotels — how many nights and hotels, how full the rooms are by hotel size, what hotels earn and keep, and how they sell rooms?

Demand: nights spent in EU27 hotels, 2019–2026

Hotels and similar accommodation (NACE I55.1), all guests, EU27. Demand passed its 2019 level in 2024 and grew by less each year since 2023. Foreign guests are just over half of all nights.

Nights spent in hotels by country, 2025

Same Eurostat table and definition for every country: all guests in hotels and similar accommodation (NACE I55.1). Six largest markets in this set.

Bedroom occupancy by hotel size, EU27, 2025 (%)

Net occupancy rate of bedrooms: rooms occupied over rooms available on the days the hotel was open. The gap by size is the single largest spread in the data — the small hotel fills about half as many of its rooms as a large one.

Bedroom occupancy in hotels by country, 2025 (%)

All hotel sizes. Southern sun-and-sea markets run fullest; Romania's hotels fill barely a quarter of their rooms.

The buyer: hotel enterprises, turnover and productivity by size

Enterprise counts and turnover are for hotels and similar accommodation (NACE I55.1); turnover per person employed is published for all accommodation (NACE I55), which also includes campsites and short-stay rentals. The EU27 turnover total is published by Eurostat rounded to the nearest €10 billion.

What hotels keep: gross operating rate by country, 2024 (%)

Gross operating surplus over turnover, hotels and similar accommodation (NACE I55.1). It is before depreciation, interest, rent on owned property and tax — the cash a hotel has left after paying staff and suppliers, and the pool any software spend comes from.

Prices: hotel inflation, chain room rates and price expectations

Hotel price inflation has slowed four years in a row. Spain and Portugal publish official room rates for all hotels in euros — August is peak season, so read them as a high-season ceiling, not a year-round price. The chain rows are the comparable hotels of each listed group in Europe, in US dollars — branded, mostly upper-scale hotels, not the average EU hotel. The DG ECFIN balance is the share of accommodation firms expecting to raise prices minus the share expecting to cut them over the next three months.

How hotels sell rooms and how digital they are, EU27

Eurostat ICT survey of accommodation enterprises (NACE I55) with 10 or more persons employed — micro hotels are not in these rows. Two in three sell through booking marketplaces, and for most of them marketplaces carry at least a fifth of online sales; very few rely on marketplaces alone.

Rules that shape hotel distribution in the EU

Verified against the issuing authority. Both change what a hotel may do on its own website versus on Booking.com — the room a direct-booking or channel tool works in.

Methodology

Every number on this page is a fact node in the God of Startups Atlas — a knowledge graph where each metric carries its source URL, reporting period, evidence tier and the verbatim quote it was taken from. Tier 1 means official or statutory sources: Eurostat, INE Spain, Statistics Portugal, the European Commission, the Court of Justice of the EU and company filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Values are shown in the currency the source reports; nothing is converted, estimated or modelled. The one calculated number — growth of nights against 2019 in the headline — is the ratio of two Eurostat values shown on this page.

Related benchmarks

Analysis built on this data

Market cells behind this benchmark

Fact tables from the same knowledge graph — one market, every number with its source, period and evidence tier.