written by:
Harriet Holst
If you run a hotel in the Netherlands, your German regulars didn’t send a goodbye note. They just stopped showing up in your booking calendar.
The reason sits on their invoice. Since 1 January 2026, hotels and holiday homes in the Netherlands charge 21% VAT on stays, up from 9%. For a German family weighing a weekend on the Dutch coast against one at home, that difference now decides the trip. According to De Gelderlander, German bookings at Landal are down 50% on last year. Landal hasn’t confirmed the figure, but the wider market tells the same story. Hiswa-Recron reports 10–20% fewer Germans at Dutch holiday parks, with coastal locations, border regions and the upper segment hit hardest.
In Zeeland, on the coast, in Limburg or near the German border, this lands right on your doorstep. Germans are the largest group of foreign visitors to the Netherlands, with 7.4 million overnight guests. For many independent hotels, they fill a big part of the year.
German guests haven’t stopped travelling. They’ve changed how they book.
Three things are happening at once. German guests hesitate longer and pick cheaper periods more often. They book later, and last-minute bookings keep rising. And higher costs push some of them across the border.
So your guest compares harder, books closer to arrival and moves their stay to whichever dates look like better value. If your prices don’t move with them, you lose the booking. Or you win it too cheaply.
Why discounting is the wrong reflex
When bookings drop, the instinct is to cut prices across the board. The market leader is trying exactly that. Landal is running discount campaigns at scale, and according to an internal report, the results so far fall short of expectations.
For an independent hotel, a blanket discount hurts even more. You give away money on nights that would have sold anyway. And your costs keep climbing: hospitality wage costs are up 25% since 2020, and tourist tax in 2025 was on average 31.4% higher than in 2021. Discounting your busy weekends to rescue your quiet Tuesdays is a trade you can’t afford.
The fix: the right price on the right night
The guests are still out there. They just book differently, and later. So hold your rate on nights with strong demand, like holidays, events and sunny weekends. Get competitive earlier on quiet dates, before your guest picks a cheaper week somewhere else. And react every day as last-minute demand comes in.
Doing that by hand means checking every night of the next few months, every morning. Your bookings, the hotels around you, what’s happening in your area. It’s the job nobody has time for. And it usually lands on the owner at 7am, with a coffee and a spreadsheet.
How RoomPriceGenie takes it off your plate
RoomPriceGenie checks demand and what the hotels around you charge, for every night up to a year ahead. Then it updates the prices in your system automatically. You set your minimum and maximum, so a price never drops below what you’re comfortable with.
Quiet dates get competitive earlier. Busy dates stop selling too cheap. When last-minute demand picks up, your prices move the same day, not next week. Prefer to check first? Recommendation mode lets you approve every rate before it goes live.
And you’re not figuring it out alone. Our Customer Success team helps you get set up and stays a message away, 24/5.
What changes for you
In a study of 567 hotels across nine countries, room revenue rose 19% on average year over year. Owners save around 10 hours a week on pricing. More than 4,000 hotels in 65 countries work with RoomPriceGenie, and 97% recommend it on HotelTechReport.
But ask owners what changed and they rarely start with numbers. They say they got their mornings back. That it took an enormous amount of pressure off their shoulders. That they sleep better at night, even when the market shifts under their feet.
You can’t change the VAT. You can change how fast you react.
Fewer German guests and later bookings make every night count more. The hotels that come through this year strong won’t be the ones with the deepest discounts. They’ll be the ones with the right price on the right night.
To learn how RoomPriceGenie can help your property boost hotel sales and increase your property’s profitability, start your free trial of our automated pricing solution today!
