Hotels and airlines scramble for last-minute Olympics bookings

PARIS – When the Olympic Games begin on July 26, expect to see mostly French spectators in the stands. 

According to data from Paris je t’aime, the city’s tourism board, the capital is expecting 11.3 million visitors during the Olympics weeks – of which only 1.5 million will be international. 

Hotels, airlines and travel agencies are feeling a pinch where they had hoped to see a boom.

Alan Bachand, owner of sports travel firm 14sb, has built his business in the past on pre-buying blocks of hotel inventory for major events and packaging it up with tickets at competitive prices for fans. But, in 2024, he told Bloomberg that sales have fallen 80 per cent short of his expectations, based on previous Games. 

“This is the first time in 25 years that we will accept less money than we paid for hotel rooms that we contracted 30 months ago,” he said.

Normally, he said, his sales begin a year before the event. “But the prices were crazy high – we had to spend US$1,000 (S$1,344) per night on hotels that would normally cost US$400 – and if we pay a lot of money, we have to mark them up and sell them for a lot of money,” he explained.

“Once everyone realised the phones weren’t ringing, around 100 days out, people started to cut prices in half and we’ve had to do the same.” 

At this point, Bachand hopes to break even. But he is not sure it will be possible.

Airlines are in similar predicaments. On July 11, United States carrier Delta Air Lines estimated it would take US$100 million in losses as travellers opted to skip France during the Olympics, leaving too many unsold seats.

In a similar situation is Air France, which expanded its flight capacity from US cities to Paris by 15 per cent during the Games. Its parent company Air France-KLM has so far reported revenue losses of at least €180 million (S$263.6 million) in July and August, which it attributes to the Olympics.

“Cities with non-stop flights to Paris like New York, Chicago, Atlanta and LA still have jaw-dropping reward flight availability for late July and into August during the Paris Olympics,” said Gilbert Ott, a spokesman for point.me, a reward travel search engine.

The trend applies industry-wide. Whereas international flights to Rio de Janeiro grew by 115 per cent year-on-year during its Olympics period in 2016, Paris has only seen a growth of 8 per cent, according to data from travel analytics company ForwardKeys.

Bachand said travellers are not afraid to spend these days, but they saw the writing on the wall that prices were set too high.

“People want to go, but they’re also willing to hold out,” he said, adding that many travellers wanted to wait and see how geopolitical events and the French election played out to better assess safety concerns before making a decision.

But with so little time remaining before the opening ceremony on July 26, hotels are getting especially anxious. The scramble to boost occupancy by decreasing nightly rates and eliminating minimum stay requirements is being felt across almost all sectors of the city’s hotel industry, including apartment rentals and luxury hotels. 

And it also comes amid a year of record tourism in Europe, where international visitors – driven by Americans – are poised to contribute €800 billion to the region’s economy. 

All told, Paris hotel occupancy levels during the event are hovering around 80 per cent, according to CoStar data released on June 26. That is markedly below hotel occupancy during London 2012 and Rio 2016, which shook out at an average of 88.6 per cent and 94.1 per cent, CoStar data shows. 

With months of planning generally required to secure tickets to the most coveted events, such as athletics and swimming, a sudden influx of spontaneous tourists is unlikely to pile into the City of Lights to fill vacant rooms. And the families and friends of athletes have, by now, made travel plans. 

Bachand has already chalked up the event as a “miss”, with business pivoting to the 2025 Super Bowl. But he has not fully closed the door on Paris yet.

“We’ll break even if we can sell just 100 more hotel rooms, and the last-minute deals are really good.” BLOOMBERG