Hotel occupancy drops to 56%

Hotels in the South had the highest occupancy for the month at 66.6%, followed by Tel Aviv with 64.5% and Haifa with 53.2%. Jerusalem hotels stood 44.7% full in November.

Israeli hotel occupancy dropped to 56 percent in November from 62% in the parallel month of 2005, the Central Bureau of Statistics said Monday. Hotels in the South had the highest occupancy for the month at 66.6%, followed by Tel Aviv with 64.5% and Haifa with 53.2%. Jerusalem hotels stood 44.7% full in November. The CBS counted 1.4 million overnight stays in its monthly report on Israeli hotels, as tourists booked 483,000 nights against the 928,000 by local vacationers. For the first 11 months of the year, hotel lodgings rose 2% to 17.9 million, while the average occupancy was 59%.