Number of hotels in Amsterdam region skyrocketing: report
The number of hotels in and around Amsterdam continues to grow. Over the past five years, 7,700 hotel rooms were added within the city, an increase of 25 percent. In the region around the Dutch capital, the number of hotel rooms grew by 40 percent, the Volkskrant reports based on its own analysis of figures from Statistics Netherlands and Amsterdam's stats department IOS.
The Volkskrant's figures exclude rooms rented through platforms like Airbnb.
Due to the ever increasing number of tourists in the Dutch capital, and increasing complaints from local residents about problems caused by tourists, the municipality took multiple measures over the past years to curb the growth of tourism. In 2016, the previous city council announced that it would say "no" to hotel plans as a standard, but did not want to ban the construction of hotels outright. That measure was implemented in 2017.
Despite this, the number of new hotel rooms in Amsterdam still increased and will only continue to do so, the newspaper writes. Hotel nhow Amsterdam RAI opens on Friday with 650 rooms. And two more hotels are scheduled to open later this year - Van der Valk Amsterdam RAI with 440 rooms, and Holiday Inn Express with 579 rooms.
The fact that the number of hotel rooms continued to grow despite the municipality's intentions, has to do with many permits that had already been issued, according to the newspaper.
The Amsterdam intention to halt the construction of new hotels may not have had a big effect in the city itself, but it did on the surrounding region - potential hotel builders focussed on surrounding municipalities with their plans.
After a 40 percent increase in the number of hotel rooms in the region over the past five years, there are plenty of plans to build new hotels in municipalities like Zaanstad, Hoofddorp, Almere, Aalsmeer, and Lelystad. If all goes according to plan, another 14 thousand hotel rooms will be added to the Amsterdam region in the coming period, the Volkskrant writes.