Germany-based user review site Trivago says the average price of a hotel room across European is falling dramatically with some cities selling nights for almost half the price of January 2009.
The continental hotel room price is around Euro 100 per night, down 12% year-on-year as hotels slash rates to help keep properties occupied.
The massive drop demonstrates the difficulty the hotel industry is still seeing in terms of getting customers to book during what is still a serious global economic upheaval and widespread disruption to existing travel plans as a result of bad weather across the continent.
Trivago, which monitors around 50 hotel booking sites to aggregate the data, says the most dramatic drop was in Dublin, Ireland, which saw a 42% decrease in average room night price to Euro 94.
Other factors include a number of price wars in local markets such as Spain.
[...] there are lessons, too, in statistics. What do we really care about the fact that hotels are in trouble in Europe? That their business is off by 12 [...]