“In the first three months of this year business was 10% below last year’s first quarter level. January and February were slow months, in March we started to recover, the same in April. We noticed that tourists started to make their bookings as early as a month in advance, compared with one or two weeks before,” Mirela Cojocaru, general manager of the Cismigiu hotel, which has been present on the local market for ten years, told ZF.
The hotel has an accommodation capacity of 60 apartments. The owner of the hotel is Spain’s Hercesa, which bought the building in 2004 and turned it into a four-star hotel in the center of Bucharest, following an investment of EUR15 million.
Last year was the best year for the hotel since it opened, with results exceeding those of 2019.
“We had an average occupancy rate of 78% last year. Although there is not the same tourist traffic as last year the rates remain unchanged because the operating costs are also higher. Tourists from Israel started to return March.”
The company that runs the hotel posted EUR1.5 million revenue in 2022, according to public data.
Hotel Cismigiu accommodates both business guests and tourists who book individually. Bucharest attracted 126,000 foreigners in January-February this year, up from 113,000 in the same period last year, according to National Statistics Institute data.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)