During the New Year celebrations, only 1,500 hotel rooms out of 5,000 in Cannes were available to guests. The Cannes tourism sector is currently in a state of serious testing.
According to Christine Welter, president of the Cannes Union of Hoteliers, foreign visitors are still an absolute minority, and hotel capacity has decreased by about a third.
Of the 5-star hotels, of which there are many festivals in the city, only two remained open (Martinez and Majestic Barrière). And they cut their capacity in half as a mostly French clientele took advantage of a fare that is much lower than what is normally charged during this holiday period, mostly from foreign guests.
As for four-star hotels, half of them remained open with very low occupancy, for example at 60-70% on New Year’s Eve.
Finally, for 2- and 3-star hotels, many establishments have remained closed, notes Christian Giordano, vice president of the hoteliers’ union.
But according to announcements about business tourism, exhibitions planned at the Palais des Festivals and congresses, the city’s main tourist activity, the worst for hoteliers is yet to come.
IPEM Cannes, an investment fair scheduled for February 1, 2 and 3, is under threat, while the first artificial intelligence festival, scheduled for February 10-12, has been rescheduled for April.
This is worrisome because Cannes hoped for a big rise in the business travel sector, already hard hit by two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the autumn.