Stats: Number of Hotel and Guest-house Visitors Up 10 percent Y-o-Y in January

Bratislava, March 14 (TASR) - The number of people staying in tourist accommodation facilities in Slovakia rose by 10 percent year-on-year (y-o-y) to almost 412,000 in January, the Statistics Office reported on Friday, adding that the first month of the year was the most successful January since the pandemic. However, Slovak hotels, guest houses and other accommodation facilities still lacked 8 percent to match the record set in the pre-pandemic month of January 2020. Guests spent over 1 million nights in hotels and guest houses in January, up 8 percent from the year before, with the average length of stay equalling 2.5 nights. More than two thirds of the accommodated tourists, whose number went up by almost 8 percent from the previous year to reach 256,000, were domestic guests. However, their number was still 9 percent below the figure for the pre-pandemic month of January, 2020. The number of foreign visitors went up by 14 percent y-o-y to 156,000, but this figure was still 6 percent lower than the one for January 2020. The most frequently visited regions in January were those with good conditions for winter tourism and skiing. Zilina region came top with 122,000 guests, followed by Presov region with 91,000. These two regions together accounted for more than half of the total visitor numbers in Slovakia. Both of them reported more than 65,000 domestic guests, but Presov region posted a significantly lower number of foreign ones. Third came Bratislava region with a 19-percent share of the total number of visitors accommodated in Slovakia in January. It was the only region for which more than half of the visitors came from abroad. ko/df