Hotels celebrate summer tourism

Tel Aviv's hoteliers are patting themselves on the back after racking up more than 560,000 hotel nights in July and August.

By MIRIAM BULWAR DAVID-HAY (TRANSLATED)
Tel Aviv's hoteliers are patting themselves on the back after racking up more than 560,000 hotel nights in July and August, reports www.mynet.co.il. Some 72,000 tourists spent 240,000 nights in Tel Aviv in July, while 67,000 visitors spent 320,000 nights in the city in August. According to the report, although more than half the tourists came from France, this was still 12 percent fewer French visitors than last year. Eli Ziv, head of the Tel Aviv Hotels Association, said the lower ratio of French tourists was caused by a temporary problem with flights from France during August, as well as by high air travel prices. The next largest group of visitors came from Germany, followed by Russia, both of which countries recorded significantly larger numbers of tourists than last year. "It was a good summer for Tel Aviv," said Ziv. "Hotels had a high occupancy rate, even though there were fewer tourists than last year. Our expectation is that this tourism year in Tel Aviv will finish well, even better than last year when we broke the record for the number of tourist nights in the city." But Ziv said he could not forecast what would happen in 2009, saying the world economic crisis was already beginning to make itself felt in the tourism sector.