Dutch restaurants recover from financial crisis; Bars struggling

People are finally eating at Dutch restaurants and staying over in hotels again after the financial crisis in 2008, but bars and pubs are still struggling. Most parts of the traditional hospitality industry are seeing recovery in their turnover volumes, but bars are more than 25 percent below the level of 2007, according to figures released by Statistics Netherlands on Monday. The turnover volume for the traditional hospitality industry - hotels and restaurants - increased to just over the pre-financial crisis levels in the first three quarters of 2015. Statistics Netherlands attributes this increase to volume growth in hotels. Restaurants are still 4 percent below the turnover volume of before the crisis. Bars on the other hand, are still struggling to recover. Their turnover, in both worth and volume, is the farthest behind the levels of before the crisis. In the first three quarters of 2015 the turnover of bars was about 7 percent below the 2007 level. In 2015 the prices in bars were more than a quarter higher than in 2007, a larger increase than in the rest of the hospitality sector and also higher then inflation in the Netherlands in this period. The volume of cafe turnover was more than a quarter below the 2007 level. The number of bars in the Netherlands also decreased significantly. In 2008 there were more than 13 thousand bars in the country. At the start of 2015 there were 11 thousand, a decrease of 13 percent. The biggest decrease was seen in the provinces of Groningen, Drenthe and Limburg, where the number of bars dropped by more than 20 percent. Flevoland was the only province to see an increase in the number of bars. With 2,100 bars Noord-Holland has the most, Flevoland has the fewest with only 110.