The success of hotel occupancy this Holy Week confirms the good tourist situation in Valencia. The balance made yesterday by the Hotel and Tourism Business Association of the Valencian Community (Hosbec) placed occupancy in the city of Valencia during these Easter holidays at 91.5%.
The city has established itself as an urban destination and proof of this is that hotel accommodation is already seeking to locate itself beyond the classic locations with a hotel plant that has 8,909 rooms and 18,280 beds, according to the latest data from Visit València.
But the benefits that the city treasures as a vacation destination ask for more. That is why from Hosbec they explain that there are some 80 hotels waiting for an opening license in the city, which Alberto Galloso, president of Hosbec in Valencia, describes as “shame for the city”.
Meanwhile, he details that most of the hotels ‘in the project’ are on Avenida Marqués del Turia outwards, because they have to look for large locations so that the numbers come out well, â€he adds. Until now, the hotel offer has focused on Ciutat Vella, where there are 9 hotels, and the surroundings of the City of Arts, with 11, but now even the peripheral neighborhoods are attractive. “In the center of Valencia there are only small buildings left and there are no plots and this means that people who want to invest do not look only there, because Valencia is an easy city to move around, so it is normal for establishments to open in other neighbourhoods” , maintains Galloso.
An example is the opening that will be carried out by the Tapestry Collection by Hilton chain, which plans to open the Cuber House Valencia, in El Cabanyal, in 2024. There, he will take over a hotel that already had a license and that he will transform into an 84-room establishment with a restaurant, bar and solarium with a swimming pool in the fishing district, which has been fashionable in recent times.
The new hotel will have 84 rooms and is expected to receive its first clients in 2024. The chain is looking for “key Spanish locations”, and Valencia is included in its plans -as Madrid or San Sebastián will soon be too- because the Valencian is ” one of the largest cities in Spain and a destination of great tourist attractionâ€, according to Carlos Miró, General Director of Development for Spain and Portugal at Hilton.
Alberto Galloso is not surprised by this interest, because “the city of Valencia has been growing in hotel interest in the last five years, and if it were not for Covid, we would be much higher,” he defends.
This interest also includes the decision of the Bestprices chain to open its fifth hotel, the first in Valencia and with 24 new rooms, before the end of the year. It also moves away from the center and opts for Patraix, where it will be the first hotel in this neighborhood in the southwest of the city. Located on Beato Nicolás Factor street, the one that flows to the popular Mercado de Jesús and where a street market is set up every Saturday, the new building has been undergoing renovations for months and yesterday the workers wore part of the interior walls.
It will be a two-star hotel that will also offer deluxe rooms to attract all kinds of customers, they say. From the company, they explain that they have chosen Valencia because they have been presented with “a lightning offer” and for this reason they have decided to take advantage of the opportunity.
Its settlement in the periphery will be framed in the “Surroundings” category that contemplates the records of hotel beds, something to which Valencia is little used, but that experts explain that “we forget” already happens in other European cities, where the vast majority of the hotels are not located in the center. With these openings and the expansion of tourism beyond the classic nerve centers, another debate opens: from where is Valencia best known?
