Reporting live from the battlefield

Normality is certainly returning to the market, according to 
Jean-Francois Laporte, head of Hotels (CEE) at CB Richard Ellis Hotels Central & Eastern Europe. But it looks like 2010 is not going to be any better from a trading perspective Mladen Petrov This certainly wasn’t an easy year for the hotel industry. It is safe to say that the industry suffered everywhere and the CEE region was no exception to that rule, unfortunately. The region followed a pattern from the Western market, where London was the only capital that succeeded in weathering the storm, relatively speaking, of course, given the circumstances. What happened in the region in 2009? Bucharest, Budapest and Prague emerged as the biggest strugglers, with occupancy decreasing respectively 16.1, 16.2 and 11.1 pct in 2009 (and RevPar dropping by 41.7 pct, 28.8 pct and 31 pct); unfortunately these cities had already