Brussels hotel occupancy hit new record in 2024

Occupancy rates for Brussels hotels hit new records last year, according to new data from Visit Brussels.

The numbers were even better than the pre-Covid year of 2019, with 9.85 million overnight stays booked.

The figure includes overnight stays in hotels, youth hostels and private flats offered on platforms such as Airbnb.

“We’ll only get the definitive figures from Statbel and Eurostat in June, but we can already confirm that this figure gives a good picture of the situation,” Visit Brussels spokesman Jeroen Roppe said.

“Indeed, we can assume that 2024 was the new record year for overnight stays in Brussels, because with that 9.8 million, the number of overnight stays is 4.8 percentage points higher than in 2023, as well as 3.6 percentage points higher than the record year 2019, before the Covid crisis.”

Brussels minister-president Rudi Vervoort (PS) also provided figures on foreign and domestic tourists who booked one or more overnight stays in Brussels last year.

Some 23% of these visitors were Belgian, 11% were from France, and Americans, Germans and British tourists each made up about 7%. Spanish tourists accounted for 6% and Italian and Dutch visitors accounted for 4% each.