dossier sur le tourisme et le développement durable

The tourist offer
18
The tourist offer
1. The accommodation capacity
Tourist accommodation falls into two large categories: on one hand the professional
establishments (hotels and similar establishments, holiday camps and tourist residences, camp
sites, youth hotels) and on the other, private accommodation (rental of furnished flats, rooms,
self-catering accommodations and B&Bs, accommodation with friends and relatives, holiday
homes). Commercial accommodation includes these two categories, except accommodation
with friends and relatives and in holiday homes.
In this Dossier, emphasis is put on hotel accommodation for two reasons: homogeneous and
comparable information for the whole of the Mediterranean regions is available, and tourist
development in the south and east Mediterranean began with the building of hotels.
This choice to study more particularly the hotel industry is more or less pertinent depending on
the country. Indeed, in some Mediterranean countries, the majority of the tourist accommodation
is non-professional. In France, for instance, hotels make up only 23% of the commercial
accommodation capacity, 7% of the total accommodation capacity (once the holiday homes are
included), and 23% of the French overnight stays. In Italy, hotels make up only 49% of the
commercial accommodation capacity. This country also has about 4 million holiday homes. In
Greece, the proportion of overnight stays in hotels went down from 80% in 1969 to 35% in
1994. Hotels make up 55% of the official commercial accommodation capacity. In Tunisia, on
the contrary, hotels make up 88% of the commercial accommodation.
Holiday beds: rise in hotel capacity
Over the last two decades (1980-2002) the South and East Mediterranean countries have
begun to catch up on hotel accommodation (Figure 7). The average annual rate in the number
of beds in hotels and similar establishments (H&S) was higher than 10% in Egypt (10.4%) and
in Turkey (10.1), the record having been reached by Cyprus (11.1%). In other words, the bed
capacity in hotels was multiplied respectively by 8.9, 8.3 and 10.5. Although less spectacular,
the rise in the number of hotel beds in the other countries is high too, even very high at 3% per
year: 7% in Algeria, 6.6 in Tunisia, 5.5% in Malta, 4.5% in Morocco, 3.5% in Israel and in
Greece, 3.7% in Libya. In the emerging destinations the hotel industry is primarily concentrated
in the capital city and for business tourists and then develops in the regions that enjoy
resources for holiday tourism. In Egypt the region of Cairo had 50% of the holiday beds at the
beginning of the 1990s, and now has only 20% with the diversification in the Sinai and the Red
Sea.
In the same period of time, the three countries of the North-West Mediterranean (Spain, France,
Italy) had a moderate rise in hotel capacity, multiplied by 1.2 in Italy and in France, 1.4 in Spain.
Indeed, these three countries had strong growth, with the creation of new resorts during the
previous decades. Nowadays the rise in hotel facilities is due rather to the extension of existing
resorts and to renovation works.
With regard to the countries of the East Adriatic, the crisis and conflicts of the 1990s did not
allow them to continue their former tourist growth. They are currently in a rehabilitation phase
(or even a reconstruction phase) of the existing facilities.