Hungarian tourism in a ‘golden age’, says agency head Guller

Hungary’s tourism sector is “enjoying a golden age”, the head of the Hungarian Tourism Agency (Magyar Turisztikai Ügynökség) said late on Monday, arguing that the sector had never been as well funded as it is now.

The number of tourists visiting Hungary last year was 1.5 times the country’s population, Zoltán Guller told the Tourism Summit 2019 conference.

The rise in the income of hotels exceeded the global average and the number of foreign tourists visiting Hungary was double the European Union average, he said.

Occupancy rates at four and five-star hotels average around 80 percent, he added.

Zoltán Guller, Hungarian Tourism Agency. Photo: MTI

On the topic of the agency’s future plans, Guller said it would carry on with its planned developments and engage in more modern marketing activities.

The agency is set to begin designing and building new sightseeing boats for the river Danube and Lake Balaton.

Next summer, it will organise “Europe’s most beautiful fireworks display” and in the autumn it will open the Hungarian pavilion at the World Expo in Dubai.

Guller also said that by 2022 the number of guest nights in commercial lodgings would reach 50 million and the tourism sector would account for 16 percent of the country’s GDP. From then on, the goal will be to improve the quality of life of the sector’s workers and local residents through tourism, he added.

As we wrote before: Tourism for Hungarians “is a form of expressing patriotism”, PM Orbán told a tourism conference organised by the Hungarian Tourism Agency in Budapest on Monday.

Source: mti