Around a quarter of all hotels and half of all hotel rooms in France belong to chains, according to new figures released by the country's statistical body INSEE.
In total, there are 18,300 hotels with five or more rooms and the country's total number of beds amounts to 650,000. Of these, some 346,000 rooms are occupied on average each day
This marks a big change over the past decade and a half. The organisation reports that in 2000, chains accounted for just an eighth of hotels and a third of the total room stock. The big growth for the chains, however, came in the 1980s with the arrival of the budget chains which took over from smaller independents because of their larger size and convenient locations in bigger cities and towns.
Our charts this week look at the distribution of hotels and rooms across category and whether they are independent or chain hotels.
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Source: INSEEIn Paris, just under a third of hotels belong to chains while this figure increases to just over 50% in urban locations outside the capital.
The research also discovered that chain hotels are, on average, three times larger than independents, with an average of 80 rooms in the former compared with 25 in the latter.
Business travellers, probably driven by policy, favour the chains. The chart below shows that more than a half of business travellers in all categories stay in chain hotels.