Downtown remains the key zone for visitors, more though will be drawn to the Olympic Park – especially MICE visitors and those looking to visit the Sochi Park (theme park), F1 and various other staged events.
Sochi has gained global publicity as host of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. It does though remain a mostly domestic resort area for coastal and mountain vacations, David Jenkins, Head of JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group, said. The coastal zone is what we refer to as “Big Sochi’ and in terms of recent hotel activity JLL Hotels & Hospitality Group here focus on Sochi city, the Khosta area and the Olympic Park in the Imeretinskaya valley. Sochi has always attracted Sanatorium users in the spring and autumn with families in the summer. The new segment for the area is MICE as a combination of hotels and expo facilities have appeared as a consequence of the Olympics. Downtown remains the key zone for visitors, more though will be drawn to the Olympic Park – especially MICE visitors and those looking to visit the Sochi Park (theme park), F1 and various other staged events.
It has been a market of private guest houses (in Adler), Sanatoria, private hotels and apartments, with only a couple of ‘quality hotels’ pre-Olympic boom. Today we now have hotels from Hyatt, Rezidor, Swissotel, Golden Tulip, Accor, Azimut and many private resorts – in addition to apartments for rent/sale. According to JLL, there were 10 branded hotel (8,504 rooms) opened in the Sochi coastal zone for Olympics, incl. Swissotel Sochi Kamelia (204 rooms) and Hyatt Regency Sochi (198 rooms) in 2014. There are also 14,100 apartments in Olympic Park.
It is almost exclusively a domestic vacation market. Recent years has seen a growth of the MICE segment especially in June and September. The annual Sochi Forum is a significant MICE event in September. July and August are the key summer demand months. 4 million tourists visited Sochi in 2013. According to the official information more than 2.5m tourists visited Sochi by the 1st of September 2014.
“Typically hotels struggled to reach 50% annual occupancy, with Sanatoria working on higher levels but for little profit. Such high supply has created a significant competition at all levels and allows local travel agents to dictate rates to an extent. It is too early to assess performance this year, 2015 will be key”, David Jenkins commented.
“There is a quality supply of hotels and resorts now along the coast – at all demand levels – but simply put there is too much supply”, David Jenkins noted. “Flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg remain very expensive which prohibits many from visiting – even when hotels offer ‘cheaper deals’. There are thousands of apartments now for sale or lease that also compete with hotels. The State tries to send events to the city but even then there are too many rooms to fill and too few events. There are some hotels that will succeed and others that will not.”
Hotel Intelligence Sochi September 2014
Tatiana is the news coordinator for TravelDailyNews Media Network (traveldailynews.gr, traveldailynews.com and traveldailynews.asia). Her role includes monitoring the hundreds of news sources of TravelDailyNews Media Network and skimming the most important according to our strategy.
She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication & Mass Media from Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens and she has been editor and editor-in-chief in various economic magazines and newspapers.
