hotel vacancy neon

Sorry, No Hotels Available. The Cities With The Fewest Hotels

When a big event rolls into town, many cities can struggle to cope with the demand for hotel rooms.

Airbnb and other holiday rental sites have alleviated such problems, although in many cases prices can be significantly higher than normal for guests.

Which cities have the fewest number of hotels for visiting tourists?

Methodology

I used Euromonitor’s Top 100 City Destinations Ranking (tourist arrivals) to identify the top 100 cities for tourism in 2015.

Using this list of 100, I then turned to Tripadvisor to identify number of accommodation options in each city. Tripadvisor splits accommodation options into 4 types:

  • Hotels
  • B&B and Inns
  • Speciality Lodging
  • Holiday Rentals

Note, the “holiday rental” category does not include rentals from popular sites like Airbnb and other equivalents which will result in a lower number reported for this category than is correct.

Results

Top 10 Destinations by Tourist Arrivals (2015)

Rank 2015 Arrivals City Country 2014 Arrivals (‘000) 2015 Arrivals (‘000) Y-o-YGrowth 2014-2015
1 Hong Kong Hong Kong, China 27,770.50 26,686.00 3.91%
2 Bangkok Thailand 17,031.70 18,734.90 -10.00%
3 London UK 17,404.00 18,580.00 -6.76%
4 Singapore Singapore 16,795.60 16,869.40 -0.44%
5 Paris France 15,058.10 15,023.00 0.23%
6 Macau Macau 14,566.00 14,308.50 1.77%
7 Dubai United Arab Emirates 13,200.00 14,200.00 -7.58%
8 Istanbul Turkey 11,843.00 12,414.60 -4.83%
9 New York City US 12,230.00 12,300.00 -0.57%
10 Kuala Lumpur Malaysia 11,629.60 12,153.00 -4.50%

Full table.

Hong Kong welcomed 28 million tourists in 2015, 10 million more than the second touristed city, Bangkok (17 million). It also saw the fastest growth (4%) for arrivals in 2015 (top 10 only). Jerba, Tunisia saw the biggest increase in tourists (top 100) (17%), whilst Osaka, Japan saw the biggest decrease in tourist arrivals (top 100) (-52%).

Top 100 Destinations by Tourist Arrivals (2015)

Histogram-of-2015-Tourist-Arrivals-000

Download chart.

To put things into perspective, while all cities in the top 10 received more than 10 million arrivals the majority of cities received less than 5 million (67).

Map-2015-Tourist-Arrivals-000

Interactive map.

The top destinations in the top 100 fall primarily in Europe and Asia.

Top 10 cities by number of accommodation options

Rank Accommodation count City Country count Hotels count B&B count Specialty Lodging count Holiday Rentals total accommodation
1 Orlando US 335 2 17 15,796 16150
2 Rome Italy 1291 3763 1097 8549 14700
3 London UK 1088 574 837 7,654 10153
4 Beijing China 6449 1292 925 44 8710
5 Paris France 1801 129 157 6,265 8352
6 Shanghai China 4999 728 292 62 6081
7 Mugla Turkey 1238 912 954 2,792 5896
8 Mexico City Mexico 1691 1796 1299 964 5750
9 Phuket Thailand 754 997 849 3064 5664
10 Barcelona Spain 521 326 764 3,984 5595

Full list.

Orlando does not have the most hotels (Beijing does, 6449) but it does have the highest number of accommodation options, 16150 in total (most of which are classified as holiday rentals by TripAdvisor).

The top 4 cities with the most hotels are all in China: Beijing (6449), Shanghai (4999), Guangzhou (3394), Shenzhen (2754).

World largest hotels by rooms

Rank Name Country City Rooms/suites
1 First World Hotel Malaysia Genting Highlands 7,351
2 The Venetian and The Palazzo United States Las Vegas 7,117
3 MGM Grand Las Vegas + The Signature United States Las Vegas 6,852
4 CityCenter United States Las Vegas 6,790
5 Sands Cotai Central Macau Macau 6,000
6 Izmailovo Hotel Russia Moscow 5,000
7 Wynn Las Vegas + Encore Las Vegas United States Las Vegas 4,750
8 Mandalay Bay + Delano + Four Seasons United States Las Vegas 4,426
9 Luxor Las Vegas United States Las Vegas 4,407
10 Ambassador City Jomtien Thailand Pattaya 4,219

Full list.

The First World Hotel in Malaysia holds the crown for the largest hotel by number of rooms (7351). 6 of the top 10 largest hotels by number of rooms can be found in Las Vegas.

Fewest accommodation options per tourist

Arrivals / accom rank City Country Accommodation options total Arrivals 2015 total Arrivals per accom
1 Macau Macau 110 14,308,500 130,077
2 Edirne Turkey 58 3,190,400 55,007
3 Pulau Pinang Malaysia 53 2,774,500 52,349
4 Burgas Bulgaria 97 2,842,800 29,307
5 Manama Bahrain 234 6,413,200 27,407
6 Hong Kong Hong Kong, China 1469 26,686,000 18,166
7 Singapore Singapore 963 16,869,400 17,518
8 Doha Qatar 169 2,930,000 17,337
9 Antalya Turkey 749 10,868,700 14,511
10 Mecca Saudi Arabia 516 7,175,200 13,905

Full list.

As an average figure, each accommodation option (hotel, B&B, etc) in Macau must serve 130,077 tourists over a year. Assuming each stays for an average of 7 days and the majority of those bookings are 1 room for 2 people, that means there must at least 1,251 rooms at each accommodation option ((130077/2)/52), assuming maximum efficiency. After further research, I found official figures (2015) that stated there are 29,725 rooms spread across 73 hotels in Macau (note, the above calculation factors in other accommodation options – not just hotels).

Compare that to Orlando, ranked 100 for arrivals / accommodation, where there is 1 accommodation option to every 309 tourists. Tourists have significantly more choice here.

Improvements

I used number of accommodation options, not rooms for these calculations. Cities like Macau and Las Vegas tend to have “mega-hotels” of 3000+ rooms each. It would be more accurate to calculate scarcity of hotel rooms against tourists, as opposed to individual hotels (and other accommodation options) as has been used in this post.

As discussed in the Methodology section of this post, the data does not include rentals from popular sites like Airbnb and other equivalents resulting in a lower numbers reported for this category than actually available. If it was possible to get an accurate count of these rentals this would improve my current workings.

tl;dr

Each hotel (and other accommodation type) must serve 130,077 tourists in Macau.

Get the Data

Get all the data used in this blog post on Google Sheets.

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