Those attending the Eurovision Song Contest will know that one of the stresses and strains of attending the Song Contest in person is the quest to find somewhere to stay. Often in the host city hotel supply is quickly snapped up, with last year’s Contest leading to the most successful month for the Liverpool hotel industry with record occupancy rates.
That is no different for Malmö. If anything it is arguable that the hotel demands in Malmö are much more, Liverpool had 10,182 hotel rooms at their disposal last May, whereas Malmö has just over 4,000, not enough on its own to cope with the tens of thousands of visitors that are expected to be in Malmö during Song Contest week.
We wanted to find out how a city deals with this to ensure that hotels are distributed in the best possible way. So we spoke to Malin Åkesson from Malmö Stad, who has responsibility for hotel liaison at this year’s Song Contest, to learn how this process works, what hotel availability is around today, and what advice there is for future host cities going forward.
Bidding To Be A Host City
The process started when Loreen was announced as the Eurovision winner. At that point, the Song Contest was offered to Swedish broadcaster SVT to host Eurovision 2024.
To be considered, host cities that want to bid for Eurovision need to deliver many requirements. Access to major airports is one, an arena of 10,000 capacity is another, and the promise to deliver at least 2,000 hotel rooms to delegations and sponsors arriving for the event is another.
Malin Åkesson came into her role with Eurovision after SVT made the decision that Malmö would host the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest. When she arrived in the role, she was presented with an Excel file full of all the hotel bookings. Those block bookings were all for different hotels within the Malmö area in different categories and at different price points.
Malin explains that one difficulty in this process was finding a suitable balance of accommodation options to offer those arriving to the Contest, particularly with regard to price, as “every supplier of hotel rooms sees their opportunity to get as much as they can from this event”. The price balance is very important for the host city to have at their disposal, as staying in the official hotels also includes members of the production or the EBU who may be on site for many weeks before the three live shows.
This also explains why when Eurovision fans searched for accommodation immediately after Malmö was announced as the host city, that almost no options were available and those options one could book were at incredibly inflated prices.
The Big Puzzle
Once it was confirmed that Malmö was to host Eurovision the plan was to divide up these block-booked hotel rooms into those suitable for delegation and sponsors, and that would be the end of the journey. However, Malin describes the situation as a “big puzzle” with many different groups influencing the decisions.
Marie Åkesson (Photo: Malmö stad)
For example, the show’s sponsors were also at different category points, and the police and security teams had input on the hotel choices and the work required to keep them secure. Furthermore, one hotel had changed its booking system over the summer, and the original block bookings there had disappeared. While there were bumps and stresses along the way, she points out that the EBU “helped us a lot” in working out where priorities should lie and also Malmö itself is more robust as a host city than in 2013, as the number of hotel rooms in the city has increased since the last time Eurovision rolled into town.
The hotel rooms’ actual booking by the Contest’s different stakeholders isn’t done by Malmö Stad themselves. Instead, a local professional producer is responsible for maintaining the platform for delegations to book their hotels. This booking process was launched alongside the Allocation Draw in January and closed at the end of February. At that point, a deposit is required from each delegation for the hotel stays.
Yes, eagle-eyed readers will correctly note that this date is prior to the Heads of Delegation meeting in mid-March, at the time when each broadcaster knows in theory their act and the size of their delegation. However delegations do have the ability to take away or add a certain percentage of their bookings until mid-April, and there’s even a last minute extra deadline available until the start of May.
Malin explained that lots of the discussions at March’s Head of Delegation meeting revolved around this. There have been requests from delegations wondering if they can squeeze in the singer’s mum into an extra hotel room, or a manager from the record label that wants to attend in person for a few days, or children of the act who wish to sleep in extra beds for a few days at the hotel, and how much extra their breakfast would cost.
The Eurovision Song Contest for many artists will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience and it’s no surprise if everybody with a connection wants to come and enjoy a piece of the action.
What About The Fans?
The 2,000 hotel rooms the city of Malmö has to organise for their Eurovision bid are only those required for the official delegations and sponsors attached to the Song Contest. For others, including the tens of thousands of domestic and international fans who are expected to be in Malmö during proceedings, are on their own to find accommodation.
Malin knows that many Eurovision fans will stay in Copenhagen for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. With easy connections to Malmö Arena via the Öresund Bridge and a special travel offer for fans wanting to travel across the bridge on one ticket, the Danish capital’s plethora of accommodation options make this a choice for many. Another popular option Malin mentions is the university city of Lund, 15 minutes away from Malmö with its own hotel offering.
However, Malin points out in our interview that for Eurovision fans now is the time to make a booking if you wish to stay in the host city.
“There are still rooms available. I was checking with some of the big booking sites and, of course, prices are a bit higher than normal but they are still what I would call “OK” prices. There will still be lots of things happening in the city even if you don’t have a ticket for the contest.”
The first of the block-booked hotels were released for general sale at the end of February when the team saw that neither delegations or sponsors had booked rooms in some of the hotels, and further rooms were released in March. The hotels wanted to release their hotels as soon as possible so that they can maximise the amount of profit they can make for having Eurovision in the city.
As of the start of April one can see that a small number of hotel rooms are available in the city for the night of the Grand Final itself, with stays generally ranging from just over €300 to €550 for two people. Earlier in the week, for example on the night of the First Semi Final there are many more hotel options available between €150 and €300 for two people. For a full comparison, the hotel price for a random Tuesday later in May tends to hover around €100 to €150 for a night in Malmö.
It is worth noting that Eurovision week falls on the same week as Ascension Day this year, and in Sweden this is a Bank Holiday, which also drives up demand for the end of Eurovision week as many domestic travellers take a 4 day vacation.
Many of these rooms on offer in Eurovision week are those that were originally reserved for the bid process, and some of the hotels available now are also delegation hotels for the competition, meaning you could be sharing a lift with your favourite Eurovision act while staying there (please just avoid making them ill).
Advice For The Future
Malin describes the work to put all this together as “complex” while also adding how important she believed it was for “the city to work really hard together.”
“We talk about the Malmö spirit that you need to have for these kind of big events when you need to work together and you have to look into the whole city, to see the effects that it can have in the long term.”
This is why cities bid and invested so much in hosting the Eurovision Song Contest. Liverpool showed last year that there was an opportunity for success. Both the immediate success in welcoming thousands of guests to the city, but beyond that economic burst of activity, there were longer lasting impacts that hosting provides that cements Malmö as an events city prepared to welcome increasing numbers of guests in the future.
We end our interview by asking Malin if there is anything else that she would give as advice to any prospective host city or a favourite in the ranks to win Eurovision at this time to prepare.
“Make the hotel bookings now! Make the block bookings now! And get them confirmed! That’s my biggest advice to the country who might have a winner. Do block bookings in all your big cities if you think you are going to win, and then you can decide where.”
Such is the size and scale of modern-day Eurovision, as well as the unmatched speed at which a host city needs to work to prepare, the advice is simple. If you think there’s any chance it could be turning up on your doorstep next May, prepare now.