PRESS RELEASE HOTELSTARS UNION

18.10.2018
Hotelstars Union makes good progress towards new catalogue of criteria

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The Hotelstars Union (HSU) Managing Board met for its annual autumn meeting in Krakow to discuss future strategic challenges. The delegates from the 17 member countries and from potential new partners such as France, Italy and Poland dealt in particular with the revision of the common catalogue of criteria for hotel classification. In this context, the current HSU-President Jens Zimmer Christensen presented interesting figures from the recently published "Delta Check Star Count 2018": More than 400,000 or 17.6 percent of the 2.3 million professional accommodations worldwide are star-rated. 50.7 percent of all star-hotels are located in Europe. The Asian market occupies second place in a global comparison with 21.2%.

“In order to maintain Europe's market share, it is all the more important to continuously revise and modernise our criteria catalogue”, underlined Jens Zimmer Christensen. The President reiterated the aim of the revision process: to simplify the criteria, increase flexibility and transparency and focus on the function behind each criterion. “The opening of the system to new, emerging concepts in the hotel market is probably the greatest balancing act of this revision process”, the President continued.

Since the Management Board meeting in Vienna in April, good progress has been made in two intensive working group meetings, so that an initial proposal could be presented and adopted in Krakow. The outstanding issues will be the subject of the next working sessions. “In parallel, we will launch a test phase at national level and will incorporate the results into a final proposal for the next Board meeting in Helsinki in May 2019”, the President mentioned as the next steps.

Hotelstars Union
Under the patronage of HOTREC – Hospitality Europe - the hotels associations of Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland have created the Hotelstars Union in 2010. In the meantime, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta and Slovenia joined the star family. Their product is a harmonised criteria catalogue for hotel classification, to provide the guests and hoteliers with transparency and security. For detailed information please visit www.hotelstars.eu.

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