Guatemala Hotel Occupancy 2015–2025: Official Rates by Department & Month

Data through December 2025. Page as of 24 August 2026. Every occupancy and supply figure below comes from the Instituto Guatemalteco de Turismo (INGUAT), the institution that issues them. Where a number is our computation rather than INGUAT’s, it says so on the line.

There is no 2026 occupancy figure. As of 24 August 2026 INGUAT’s occupancy archive holds bulletins for 2018 through 2025 and no 2026 category at all, even though its lodging-supply bulletins run to the first quarter of 2026. The latest full year is 2025. We re-check the archive monthly and will restamp this page when a 2026 bulletin lands.

Quick summary

• 74% — the national hotel occupancy index for 2025, against 72% in 2024 and 63% in 2019. Guatemala’s hotels are running materially fuller than before the pandemic.
• 7,171,117 occupied room-nights out of 9,648,860 available in 2025.
• December 2025 was 88% — the highest month in INGUAT’s published monthly series, which begins in 2019. October 2025 was the weakest at 64%.
• 80% of occupied room-nights were booked by residents of Guatemala. All of 2025’s growth was domestic: resident room-nights rose 7.6% while non-resident room-nights fell 3.4%.
• The index measures hotels only — about 38% of Guatemala’s registered rooms. Pensiones, hospedajes and moteles are outside the denominator. So is Airbnb.
• Registered lodging supply, Q1 2026: 4,439 establishments, 70,140 rooms, 189,842 bed-places.

What the number actually measures

INGUAT’s glossary defines the index in one sentence, and every caveat on this page follows from it. Verbatim, from the Boletín Ocupación Hotelera enero a diciembre 2025, glossary, p.29:

Índice de Ocupación Hotelera: Es un indicador porcentual que se da según la región y el tiempo de referencia, así: Habitaciones Ocupadas Residentes + Habitaciones Ocupadas no Residentes dividido Número habitaciones registradas X días del mes, este cociente se multiplica por 100 y el resultado de expresa en %

In English: occupied rooms ÷ (registered rooms × days of the month). Four consequences:

And the coverage caveat that belongs in the headline, not a footnote: the index covers hotels only. The 2025 denominator of 9,648,860 available room-nights ÷ 365 implies a base of about 26,435 rooms. Guatemala has 70,140 registered rooms across all four lodging groups, or 61,614 across the three overnight groups. The implied base instead lands almost exactly on INGUAT’s own count of hotel rooms — 26,230 in Q1 2025 and 26,555 in Q3 2025, i.e. precisely where a calendar-year average of the hotel stratum should sit.

So when Guatemala is reported at 74% occupancy, that is hotels. The roughly 43,000 registered rooms in pensiones, hospedajes and moteles — 61% of national supply — are not in the number, and neither is any short-term rental. This is corroborated independently: UN Tourism files Guatemala’s occupancy under an indicator named verbatim capacity - accommodation - short-term accommodation, hotels and similar (ISIC 5510) - rooms - rate, an outside statistical body reading INGUAT’s own submission and classifying it as a hotels, rooms metric. A published academic bulletin from Universidad Rafael Landívar (biblior.url.edu.gt, p.32) states the index is calculated on plazas disponibles (bed-places); that is wrong, and INGUAT’s glossary, its chart series names and UN Tourism’s indicator name all say rooms.

National annual series, 2015–2025

Metric on every row: occupied room-nights ÷ (registered rooms × days), hotel stratum sampled via Encuesta OCUPATUR, registered establishments only.

INGUAT footnotes 2020 as “Año de pandemia Covid-19”. The 2015 row is published in the July 2025 bulletin, whose ten-year window runs 2015–2024; the annual 2025 bulletin’s window runs 2016–2025, so 2015 appears in only one of the two. Both are correct rolling windows.

Variance note: the 2025 available room-nights figure appears twice in the same bulletin, as 9,648,860 in the monthly table (which sums to that value from its own twelve rows) and 9,648,890 in the ten-year series. The difference is 30 room-nights and changes nothing — the index is 74% either way. We publish the verifiable 9,648,860.

The framing worth taking away: 2025’s 74% sits 11 points above 2019’s 63%, and it does so on a room base 17.9% larger (8.19M → 9.65M available room-nights). Occupied room-nights are 38.1% above 2019. Recovery understates it.

Monthly series

National occupancy index by month, as INGUAT publishes it (whole percent):

INGUAT publishes one pre-pandemic monthly series, to two decimals, and it is the only place 2019 monthly data exists:

Two honesty notes. November 2023 at 41% — a 15-point one-month collapse between 56% in October and 65% in December — has no analogue anywhere in the series, and the decimal table on the same page does not publish it. We print it as INGUAT prints it and flag it as an unexplained outlier rather than presenting it as a demand event. And December 2025’s 88% is the highest month in the published monthly series (2019–2025), not an all-time high: INGUAT publishes 2015–2018 as annual figures only, so no monthly comparison against those years is possible.

Two peaks, and which one wins keeps flipping

The claim that Semana Santa is Guatemala’s peak hotel season was false in both 2024 and 2025. April carried 2023 and 2024; December carried 2019, 2022 and 2025. But Easter moves: Easter Sunday fell on 31 March in 2024, so Holy Week 2024 sat entirely inside March — a month that measured 74% — and the 87% April 2024 peak contained not a single day of it. In 2025 Holy Week did fall in April (Easter Sunday 20 April), and April’s 83% still lost to December’s 88%. So the April column is not a Semana Santa column: it captures different amounts of Holy Week in different years, April-on-April comparison is not like-for-like, and INGUAT publishes no Semana-Santa-week series that would settle it.

October was the national trough in 2019 (61.12%), 2024 (63%) and 2025 (64%) — but not every year: the 2022 trough was March (39%) and the 2023 trough was November (41%). A secondary dip runs through June and July (68% and 65% in 2025).

Seasonality also appears to be widening: the 2019 monthly range was 61.12%–66.03%, a spread of 4.9 points, against 64%–88% in 2025, a spread of 24 points. We rate that medium confidence and would not build a headline on it — the 2019 figures come from a different collection era, and a band that flat across twelve months is itself slightly suspicious of smoothing. The 2015–2018 monthly series, which INGUAT does not publish in its current bulletins, would settle it.

The Semana Santa correction

Nearly every Semana Santa occupancy figure in circulation is a forecast or a reservations rate, not a measured result. The most-repeated one shows exactly how this goes wrong.

In April 2023 Prensa Libre reported that Semana Santa occupancy “podría alcanzar el 92%” according to INGUAT estimaciones. That is a forecast, published before Holy Week, and it has been quoted ever since as though it were an outcome.

The measured outcome, from INGUAT’s own bulletin: the national index for April 2023 was 74%. The 92% figure does have a real referent, which is why it will not die — it is almost exactly the measured April 2023 result for Sacatepéquez department (92%). A national forecast happened to land on the later measured result for one department, and that coincidence has kept it circulating as a national measured fact.

Use this label test on any Guatemalan occupancy figure before repeating it:

Worked examples from the published record: the 100% quoted for Sacatepéquez in Semana Santa 2023 was an expectation; the 95% quoted for Antigua in 2024 was reservas confirmadas; the 80–85% quoted for Antigua ahead of Semana Santa 2026 was a reservations rate. Statements attributed to municipal, INGUAT and association officials about a week already under way are measured-as-stated — a person reporting what they observed — which is a third category again, and not the same as an index computed from returns.

Occupancy by department, 2025

⚠ Read the warning before the table. These indices are survey results computed on denominators that differ between departments, and ranking one department against another is not supported by the data. Backing out each department’s implied denominator from INGUAT’s own figures and comparing it against that department’s hotel-room count gives ratios ranging from 0.29× (Huehuetenango) to 2.13× (Guatemala). Guatemala and Sacatepéquez are weighted roughly twice their hotel-room share. The mechanism is explained in full below. Use the table for each department’s own trajectory and seasonal shape, not for a league table.

The room-night counts, unlike the indices, are straightforwardly additive, and they show how concentrated the sector is:

Two departments hold 60% of every occupied hotel room-night in Guatemala; six hold 80%. The remaining sixteen share the last fifth.

There is no occupancy index for Antigua Guatemala the city. INGUAT publishes by department only. Guatemala’s Antigua tourism observatory carries a series headed “índice de ocupación hotelera anual — La Antigua Guatemala”, but its rows are the Sacatepéquez department figures: 2022 shows 713,217 occupied room-nights at 84% and 2023 shows 1,161,094 available / 944,651 occupied at 81%, matching INGUAT’s departmental table digit for digit in both years. The heading is a mislabel. Anyone citing an Antigua occupancy of 83% is citing a whole department, with 232 registered lodging establishments. Two INGUAT products also disagree slightly on Sacatepéquez 2024 occupied room-nights — 1,196,338 in the national bulletin, 1,196,388 at the observatory, a gap of 50 rooms; we publish the national bulletin’s figure and the index is 83% either way.

Every department, every month of 2025

This is the grid that makes the dataset useful for trip planning, and the part of it that is analytically safest. The cross-department comparability problem is about denominators differing between departments; within a single department the denominator is constant across the twelve months, so each row’s month-to-month shape is sound even where its level is not comparable to another row’s.

Index, %, 2025:

What the grid says that no summary does:

• Sacatepéquez (Antigua’s department) fills twice a year — April and December, 97% both times. It is the only major destination where Semana Santa reaches the annual peak, and it is a tie, not a win. Its low month is July (62%), not October — the northern summer, which is the opposite of almost everywhere else in the country.
• Petén (Tikal) is Guatemala’s most seasonal department: 95% in February against 43% in October — its peak month runs 2.2× its trough, a ratio unaffected by the denominator caveat above. Santa Rosa follows at 2.1× (76% in January to 36% in October), then Sololá (Atitlán) at 2.0× (96% in December to 48% in October).
• Every other big market peaks in December alone — Guatemala 98%, Sololá 96%, Escuintla 96%, Izabal 92%.
• October is the national low, but it is not the low season everywhere. Counting departments, the most common trough month is January (8 of 22), ahead of October (6) and March (5). October dominates the national figure because the highest-volume departments — Petén, Sololá, Izabal, Escuintla, Chiquimula, Santa Rosa — all bottom out then.
• Guatemala department never really empties (71%–98%). El Progreso is the flattest of all (27%–34%) and never fills.

Who is filling the rooms

Both are shares of the same denominator, which is why they sum to the total index. INGUAT states the split as 80% residents / 20% non-residents.

This is the most under-reported fact in the dataset. Four out of five occupied hotel room-nights in Guatemala are booked by Guatemalans — and in 2025 the foreign side shrank, by 51,662 room-nights (−3.4%), while the resident side grew by 403,437 (+7.6%). Every bit of 2025’s hotel growth was domestic. Guatemala’s hotel industry is a domestic-demand business that foreign tourism tops up, not the reverse. That pairs directly with the flattening in visitor arrivals during 2026.

National guest and overnight movement, 2025:

Our computation from those rows: nights per guest are 1.28 for residents and 1.85 for non-residents — foreign guests stay about 45% longer per hotel stay. We publish this at national level only. INGUAT also breaks guests and nights down by department, but those departmental figures are derived rather than measured (see below), so no department-level length-of-stay comparison appears on this page.

Lodging supply

Supply is a separate INGUAT product and it is more current than occupancy — through the first quarter of 2026.

Q1 2026, all four registered groups:

Year on year against Q1 2025: establishments +4.4%, rooms +4.5%, bed-places +5.3%.

Ten-year series (three overnight groups only — hoteles, pensiones and hospedajes, excluding auto-hoteles):

Supply kept growing through 2020, the pandemic year (+62 establishments, +1,249 rooms), and only contracted in 2021–2023, bottoming at 3,327 establishments — a three-year shakeout that lagged the demand collapse by a year. 2024 was the sharp rebound, the largest one-year gain in the series at +189 establishments. Guatemala added 8,768 rooms (+16.9%) between 2016 and 2025.

Supply by department, Q1 2026 (all four groups):

The counter-intuitive line: Sacatepéquez, the Antigua department and Guatemala’s most famous tourism market, holds only 5% of national supply and ranks 8th by establishment count — behind Huehuetenango and San Marcos. It is a small lodging market, not a large one.

Hotel rooms specifically (group 1) went from 26,230 to 27,058 between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, up 3.2%. The growth is in the west and at the lake — Sololá +173 rooms (+10.6%), Quetzaltenango +207 (+8.3%), Baja Verapaz +70 (+15.6%), Zacapa +73 (+9.4%), Santa Rosa +82 (+8.9%) — while the capital’s hotel room count fell by 51 (−1.1%).

What the number does not measure: three findings

Each of these is established arithmetically from INGUAT’s own two products, and each changes how the headline may honestly be used.

1. The index is hotels only — about 38% of registered rooms. Set out in full above. Confidence: high on the mechanism, and high on intent since UN Tourism’s indicator name corroborates it. Residual uncertainty: INGUAT never says “hotels only” in plain words, and the word muestra on its source page still implies a sample rather than the full stratum. Rejected along the way: that the index covers all four groups (that would imply a 70,140-room base) and that it covers the three overnight groups (61,614 — still 2.3× too large).

2. Departmental indices are not cross-comparable. Implied denominator ÷ hotel rooms, by department, runs from 0.29× to 2.13× — and recomputing against a different quarter’s supply gives a materially identical spread, so it is not a year-alignment artefact. The sum of implied departmental bases is 26,370 rooms against a national base of 26,435, a 0.2% match: the departmental figures are internally consistent with the national total, but their allocation across departments does not track INGUAT’s own supply census. The likeliest explanation is a fixed survey panel skewed toward the two big tourism markets, with the national base reconciled to total hotel rooms — which would overstate occupancy in well-covered departments and understate it in thin ones. Rejected: rounding (worst case ~1.5% relative, cannot produce a 7× spread) and year alignment (directly tested). Also rejected: that Sacatepéquez simply runs over 100% — its occupied room-nights divided by 365 come to 3,488 rooms a day against 3,273 registered rooms of all four groups, which is not a real occupancy level, it is the denominator mismatch. Never derive a department’s occupancy from the supply census, and never cross-multiply an index by room counts. Confidence: high that they are not cross-comparable, low on the specific cause — INGUAT publishes no OCUPATUR sample design.

3. Departmental guest and night counts are derived, not measured. Across all 22 departments, guests per occupied room and nights per occupied room vary by only 1.1%–1.6%. Real lodging markets cannot behave that way: a business capital, a backpacker lake town and a jungle archaeology destination would show materially different party sizes and lengths of stay. A spread that narrow is the signature of a national coefficient applied to occupied rooms. The non-resident value — 0.98 guests per occupied room, i.e. no double occupancy anywhere, ever — is independently implausible and points the same way. Confidence: high on the mechanism, medium on cause; INGUAT does not label these as derived and it may be an expansion-factor artefact. This is why this page publishes national guest and night figures and no departmental ones.

Short-term rentals: no verified source exists

This page carries no Airbnb or short-term-rental occupancy figure, and that is deliberate.

• INGUAT’s index excludes short-term rentals by construction — an unregistered rental cannot enter the survey at all, and our denominator reconstruction shows the sampled stratum is narrower still: registered hotels.
• INE, Guatemala’s statistics institute, runs no lodging survey. Its full theme and survey lists contain no tourism, hotel or accommodation instrument.
• There is no national hotel association publishing statistics in Guatemala. The frequently cited “Asociación de Hoteles de Guatemala” does not exist — six candidate domains return NXDOMAIN and the Wayback Machine has never archived any of them. CAMTUR is quoted in the press as a source of destination estimates but publishes no series. The Cámara de Comercio and AGEXPORT publish none either.
• Commercial short-term-rental estimates for Guatemala do exist, but we could not reproduce them at the publisher: the pages are client-rendered and no value appears in the served document. Until that is captured and dated, they do not go on this page.

The one non-INGUAT Guatemalan occupancy series is from the think-tank ASIES, which put 2023 at 75% against INGUAT’s 61%. Those are not reconcilable and not a contradiction — different universes and sample designs — and ASIES’s own reliability warning has to travel with its number: “la tasa de respuesta fue muy baja, por lo que solo hay 55 establecimientos de hoteles y el error para los indicadores de esta sección es de 11.4 %, con un nivel de confianza de 95 %”. Never average the two.

Cross-checks

State the dependency honestly: these are not three independent measurements. Both UN Tourism and SITCA source Guatemala’s figure from INGUAT, which names INGUAT as the reporting entity. The table corroborates transcription, not measurement. The one-point gap at 2023 is a rounding or vintage difference on a figure SITCA takes from INGUAT; cite 61%. UN Tourism’s 2022 supply row — 57,191 rooms, 157,070 bed-places, 3,345 establishments — matches INGUAT’s supply series exactly.

Where each SITCA cell comes from: 2024 (72%) and the regional comparison are in the text of SITCA’s 2024 compendium, §7.1.4; the 2019 (63%) and 2022 (50%) cells are read from that compendium’s Gráfico 7.1.4.1, which is published as a chart image; and 2023 (62%) is from SITCA’s 2023 compendium (p.33: occupancy rose “del 50% al 62%”).

For regional context, SITCA’s 2024 compendium puts the SICA regional average at 57.3% (excluding Honduras) against Guatemala’s 72%, and describes Guatemala’s 2024 as “el resultado más alto en los últimos 20 años para este país”.

How we verified this

The primary source is INGUAT’s Boletín Ocupación Hotelera enero a diciembre 2025 (35 pp), read in full, supported by the July 2025 and January–March 2025 bulletins, the annual 2023, 2018, 2020 and 2021 bulletins, the January–June 2024 bulletin, the Serie Histórica de la Ocupación Hotelera 2007–2021 (129 pp, 22 departments × 15 years), and the lodging-supply bulletins for Q1 2026 and Q3 2025 plus Q4 2023 and 2018–2021. All retrieved 24 August 2026.

• INGUAT hotel occupancy bulletin archive
• INGUAT lodging supply bulletin archive
• Boletín Ocupación Hotelera enero a diciembre 2025
• Boletín Oferta Hotelera primer trimestre 2026
• UN Tourism accommodation indicators workbook
• SITCA statistical compendium 2024
• SITCA statistical compendium 2023
• INGUAT Antigua tourism observatory
• ASIES business survey, travel & tourism sector (22nd)
• Prensa Libre, April 2023 (the 92% forecast)

A note on retrieval, because it affects whether you can check us. inguat.gob.gt sits behind an interactive bot challenge: a plain request returns 403, so does one with a desktop browser user-agent, and text-extraction proxies return only the challenge page. Two rungs work — the Wayback Machine for the back catalogue, and a real browser session for anything published since the last snapshot. Both were used. If you try to fetch these PDFs with a script and get nothing, that is the wall, not a dead link.

Archived artifacts. Every PDF above, plus the parsed department files, is stored in this repository under content/sources/hotel-occupancy-2026/ with a SHA256SUMS.txt covering the directory. The two derived datasets are dept_month_2025.csv (the 2025 department × month grid reproduced on this page) and dept_annual_occupancy_2007_2021.csv (330 rows: 22 departments × 15 years, with resident and non-resident splits).

Integrity checks we ran, and what they found. Summing the historical file’s 22 departments per year against INGUAT’s published national occupied room-nights matches exactly for 2017, 2020 and 2021, within 2 room-nights for 2015 and 2016, and within 0.18% and 0.69% for 2018 and 2019 — a genuinely well-built dataset. It also carries defects we will not paste onto a page: Alta Verapaz’s 2015 monthly resident/non-resident split repeats its annual values down all twelve months, Alta Verapaz December 2020 prints a non-resident index of 11800.00% (a decimal error), and Sololá 2018 and Jutiapa 2007 fail their own additivity checks by 3,000 and 1,012 rooms. The historical bulletin also states that it is current only through December 2021 and is methodologically distinct from today’s monthly product, so we present the two eras separately and never splice them into one line.

Also checked and deliberately excluded: short-term-rental occupancy (no reproducible source), department-level length of stay and guests per room (derived, not measured), zone-level occupancy for Guatemala City (does not exist in INGUAT’s product line), and any 2026 occupancy figure (not published). WTTC, the World Bank, CEPALSTAT, STR/CoStar and HotStats publish no usable Guatemala occupancy figure at all — we looked.

If you think a figure here is wrong, tell us. Send the issuer document and the page number and we will correct the page and say what changed. You can also browse our full data sources list.

Update cadence

INGUAT published occupancy bulletins monthly through December 2025 and, as of 24 August 2026, none for 2026 — while its supply bulletins have moved on to Q1 2026. We do not yet know whether that is a publication lag or a discontinued series. We re-check the occupancy archive monthly through the browser rung and will restamp this page and add 2026 months as soon as they appear. The supply tables will be refreshed each quarter on their own faster cadence.

Frequently asked questions

What is Guatemala’s hotel occupancy rate? The latest full year INGUAT has published is 2025, at 74%, against 63% in 2019. No 2026 occupancy figure exists as of 24 August 2026.

What does the index actually measure? Occupied rooms ÷ (registered rooms × days of the month) — rooms, not beds, registered establishments only, collected through a sample survey INGUAT calls Muestra Encuesta OCUPATUR.

Does it cover all lodging? No. The implied base of about 26,435 rooms matches INGUAT’s count of hotel rooms alone against a national total of 70,140 registered rooms — roughly 38% coverage. Pensiones, hospedajes, moteles and short-term rentals are outside it.

Was Semana Santa 2023 really 92%? No. That was an INGUAT forecast published before Holy Week. The measured national index for April 2023 was 74%; 92% was the Sacatepéquez departmental result.

What is Antigua’s hotel occupancy rate? There is no published index for Antigua the city. The figure quoted as Antigua is Sacatepéquez department — 82% in 2025 — including the observatory series headed “La Antigua Guatemala”, whose rows match the department’s exactly.

Which month is high season? April and December, and which wins flips year to year. December 2025 hit 88%, the highest month in the published monthly series (2019–2025). October is the national low at 64% in 2025 (though not every year: 2023’s low was November).

Can I rank departments against each other? Not safely — implied denominators differ by 0.29× to 2.13×. Each department’s month-to-month shape is sound; the cross-department league table is not.

Is there Airbnb occupancy data for Guatemala? No verified source exists. INGUAT excludes short-term rentals, INE runs no lodging survey, and Guatemala has no hotel association publishing statistics.

Related data pages

Guatemala tourism statistics — visitor arrivals and growth · Guatemala statistics — cost of living, prices and wages · Things to do in Guatemala