UNDERSTAND THE EVOLUTION OF THE FRENCH HOTEL FLEET

At the beginning of 2017, metropolitan France had nearly 17,200 hotels [1], of which three-quarters were registered. The hotel creations, disappearances and restyling observed in 2016 resulted in a deficit of 200 establishments over one year. The trend is not new but it has grown since 2014 due to an upsurge in hotel disappearances (see below).
At the same time, the volume of rooms offered stood at around 637,500 rooms in early 2017, a slight decline over one year (-0.1%). This evolution results from three main types of movements:

Chart 1:  Movements observed in the hotel industry in metropolitan France 
and annual change in the hotel portfolio (rooms)

• The disappearances of hotels (about 450 in 2016, for a total of 8,400 rooms) . A slight decrease compared to 2015 (9,000 missing rooms), this indicator is in line with the peak observed for three years. The hotel fleet is indeed in a pivotal period: the retirement of operators, many small hotels can not cope with regulatory constraints or simply the investment required for a refresher, etc. We were able to identify the reasons for disappearing in three out of four cases. The main ones are:
  • Malfunctions (36%): hotel closures without recovery during the year.
  • Cessation of activity (28%): hotel closures following the retirement of their operator without a buyer having been identified, stopping the hotel business in establishments that otherwise provide a restaurant.
  • Reconversions in gites, furnished or bed and breakfast (16%). In this case, it is a transfer of reception capacities between the hotel market and the para-hotel business.    
  • Reconversions in social housing (7%): these intervene mainly in Île-de-France and in big cities.
  • Heavy renovation / restructuring requiring a closure of one year or more (4%).

Beyond the establishments closed temporarily for renovation, which logically reintegrate the offer at the end of their work, all the disappearances of hotels are not definitive. Of the 760 hotels whose disappearance was recorded in 2011 and 2012, nearly a hundred (13%) were again operational in early 2017.

• The rebroadcasts (about 120 in 2016) : these are the reactivations mentioned above, to which are added the obsolete hotels or guest rooms repositioned on the traditional hotel market. With the addition of capacity variations (enlargements or reductions in the number of rooms operated in many hotels), these movements represent more than 2,400 rooms and contribute fully to the evolution of the national hotel network.

• Hotel creations (132 in 2016, for a total of approximately 5,600 rooms) . The strong momentum recorded in 2015 (nearly 8,000 rooms created, including 3,500 in Ile-de-France) was not maintained. Since the beginning of the decade alone 2011 has had such a low volume of rooms created. In the Paris region, this slowdown is partly explained by the wait-and-see attitude following the terrorist attacks of 2015. In the large regional cities, it corresponds to a pause after a sustained development in recent years.