Tourism agency: Bookings for New Year weekend up by 11 pc

Bookings by local and foreign guests to spend the year-end weekend in Hungarian hotels have gone up by 11 percent compared with the previous year, the Hungarian Tourism Agency (MTU) said on Thursday.

Accommodation for a total of 365,000 guest nights have been booked so far with 207,000 reservations made for destinations in the countryside with Lake Balaton and the Mátra-Bükk Hills being most popular, the agency said. Bookings by foreign guests have increased by 13 percent, MTU said.

A total of 158,000 reservations have been made in Budapest, 14 percent more than in 2022, said MTU. Seventy-two percent of the foreign guests have booked an accommodation to celebrate the new year in Budapest with most of them coming from Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Britain.

MTU noted that last year some 14 million guests had spent a total of 40 million guest nights in Hungarian hotels.

It said that tourism is a strategic sector in Hungary which contributed some 12 percent to the country’s GDP in 2022. The sector has around 100,000 businesses employing over 400,000 people, MTU said.

A strategic goal set for 2030 is to increase the sector’s contribution to Hungary’s GDP to 16 percent.

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Source: MTI