HCMC hotels suffered a plunge in both hotel room rates and occupancy in Q1 after the country was struck by its third Covid-19 outbreak.  

Five-star hotels in Dong Khoi Street in HCMC, June 2020.
Photo by VnExpress/Nguyen Nam.

The average room rate was $62 per night, down 20 percent year-on-year, according to a recent report by real estate consultancy Savills Vietnam. The occupancy as a whole was just 17 percent, a year-on-year fall of 31 percentage points.

The five-star segment experienced the highest slump with a 30 percent and 35 percent fall in room rate and occupancy, respectively.

The tourism industry, already struggling for than a year because of the pandemic, got no respite in Q1, with the third Covid-19 outbreak hitting Vietnam at the end of January.

The industry’s Q1 revenues plunged 60 percent year-on-year to VND3.1 trillion ($134.7 million), according to the HCMC Tourism Department.

Supply fell 8 percent year-on-year to around 15,000 rooms in 100 hotels. Several hotel chains cut down the number of rooms to reduce costs.

A total of 17 hotels with 2,400 rooms are operating as pandemic quarantine facilities.

The tourism and hospitality industries will have to rely on domestic tourists for business this year. HCMC has targeted serving 34 million domestic tourists this year and earning tourism revenues of VND140 trillion.