During the pandemic, youth hostels in NRW also had to cope with severe losses. Now the low has been overcome, especially the school classes are streaming back into the houses. But there are new hurdles.
Bielefeld (dpa / lnw) - The pandemic lull has also been overcome for the youth hostels in North Rhine-Westphalia. Above all, the "comeback of class trips" in 2022 contributed to a positive development with a sharp increase in the number of overnight stays - this applies across Germany as well as in the most populous federal state, the German Youth Hostel Association (DJH) reported on Tuesday in Bielefeld.
The state associations of Rhineland and Westphalia-Lippe counted more than 1.5 million overnight stays for NRW 2022 - in the Corona crisis year 2021 it was only a good 596,000. If you compare the numbers with those of the pre-pandemic year 2019, the 62 youth hostels in North Rhine-Westphalia are down 7.9 percent - but the trend is clearly positive.
Almost 8.6 million overnight stays were booked nationwide in 2022 - well over twice as many as in the previous year with only 3.9 million overnight stays.
For both regional associations, school classes are the most important guest group - with almost leaps and bounds in growth. In the Rhineland, the number of overnight stays in this area in 2022 was 6.7 percent higher than in the pre-Corona year 2019. The backlog demand for shared experiences and social learning is enormous. This catch-up effect was also clearly noticeable in Westphalia-Lippe after two years of the pandemic. The managing director for Westphalia-Lippe, Guido Kaltenbach, even spoke of a record year for the hotels there: With 276,500 overnight stays by school classes, the highest value in the past 15 years was recorded in the region.
Kaltenbach emphasized the great importance of school trips and the charitable role of youth hostels as "extracurricular places of learning and independent providers of child and youth welfare". Many houses in NRW also took part in the "Catching up after Corona" program, which was funded by federal funds - and were able to offer supervised holiday camps and adventure-based stays for eligible families.
According to the information, only a few members turned their backs on the association during the pandemic, and at the same time there were many new memberships in NRW in 2022. The Rhineland State Association alone, with currently 322,280 members, is in second place after Baden-Württemberg. As of the end of 2022, there were a good 2.3 million members across Germany.
However, there are also new difficulties for the youth hostels: the rising prices for food and energy, for example, pose major challenges for the state associations, as both described. Price adjustments cannot be ruled out entirely. Nevertheless, one looks optimistically into the current year: The status of the advance bookings received so far is pleasing.
