Germany's hospitality sector recorded a real, price-adjusted turnover decrease of 1.3% and a nominal decline of 1.2% in August 2026 compared to July 2026, according to preliminary results released by the Federal Statistical Office, known as Destatis. When measured against the same month of the previous year, August 2025, real turnover dropped by 4.2%, whereas nominal turnover registered an increase of 2.7%. For the preceding month of July 2026, the figures compared to June 2026 were revised, showing a real rise of 1.9% against the previously published provisional value of 1.5%, while the nominal increase was adjusted to 1.7% from the preliminary 1.3% figure.
A closer examination of the sectors reveals that hotels and other accommodation providers experienced a turnover increase in August 2026 compared to July 2026, advancing by a real 0.4% and a nominal 0.3%. Relative to August 2025, accommodation turnover decreased by a real 0.4% while rising by a nominal 4.0%. In contrast, the food and beverage service activities sector, or gastronomy, suffered a real decline of 1.8% and a nominal drop of 1.7% in August 2026 compared to the prior month. On an annual basis, gastronomy turnover fell by a real 5.4% compared with August 2025, though nominal figures showed an increase of 2.4%.
Regarding statistical methodology, the economic statistics for the hospitality industry underwent comprehensive methodological updates starting with the reporting month of June 2026. These changes included transitioning to a new base year of 2021 and introducing Laspeyres indices to replace traditional index numbers, thereby permitting consistent and methodically harmonized representations of developments across higher economic activity levels. Furthermore, the reporting unit was shifted from legal entities to business units of legal entities, allowing economic activities to be captured with greater differentiation and assigned more precisely to respective economic branches. Destatis noted that these modifications can cause comparatively high revisions to previous results in individual reporting months, with detailed explanations available via a web article on the wholesale and retail trade thematic page of the statistical office's website.
The published figures for hospitality turnover reflect net revenues excluding value-added tax, which are then deflated using an appropriate price index based on net prices. Destatis emphasizes that users must consider varying comparison periods, noting that short-term economic observation focuses primarily on calendar- and seasonally adjusted values compared to the previous month. Meanwhile, calendar-adjusted year-on-year comparisons provide longer-term level assessments independent of seasonal fluctuations and calendar effects. Additionally, results in hospitality statistics can diverge from tourism statistics during summer months due to timing differences between accommodation revenues and actual overnight stays, alongside methodological distinctions between the datasets.
Destatis routinely incorporates late submissions from surveyed reporting units, updating initial results on a monthly basis with corresponding revision tables detailing the impact of such updates. Long-term time series for monthly hospitality statistics remain accessible via the GENESIS-Online database tables, and the data are additionally integrated into the official Dashboard Konjunktur portal.
