Several Hungarian baths to be closed from Monday
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From Monday, several Hungarian baths will be temporarily closed. Baths and visitors alike fear a wave of closures that was avoided last year. They are slowly losing the crowd of visitor that was generated by the holidays.
The winter break, which has been extended this year, has brought several full house days and excellent year-end sales to many spas, Vg.hu reports.
“The moment of truth, however, will come on Monday, 9 January, and in the weeks that follow, when it will become clear what kind of domestic and foreign visitor traffic the facilities can expect in the period before the beach season,”
said Zoltán Balogh, Secretary General of the Hungarian Bathing Association. According to him, the extended winter holiday resulted in several fully booked days. The problem is that the now 10-12 percent rise in ticket prises does not solve the deficit caused by rising costs. They make ends meet with the profits from the previous years.
A test period will now begin in the remaining baths, where further price increases will be introduced. The purpose is to test if more revenue is generated from the sale of more expensive tickets than is lost due to falling numbers of visitors.
Record prices in Hungarian baths
Budapest’s historic spas have seen the highest price rises, with a 30 percent increase to start the year, but this is not deterring the main target audience of foreign tourists. In Western Europe, the EUR 30 increase in Budapest ticket prices is considered to be quite average.
The baths and spas Hungarians once considered cheap now have to increase their prices. For example, Veresegyház Bath will increase their ticket prices by 190 percent. The price of tickets has jumped from HUF 1400 (EUR 3.54) to HUF 4000 (EUR 10.12). The increase in revenue is only enough to cover a fraction of the increased spending, since they have still not recovered from the price increase ban imposed during Covid and from the rising energy prices. Also, the spa sector was left out of the HUF 30 billion (EUR 76 million) tourism rescue aid programme.
Makes more sense to lower the prices. People would love to escape the miserable winter blues… Get creative with special days. Be more experimental with your business model before hiking the prices. We just can’t afford it – and you’ll be closed for good if you don’t think out of the box.