Hotel barge

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Hotel barge" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A hotel barge (fr. péniche hôtel) is a barge that has been built or converted to serve as a hotel or other kind of lodging. Hotel barges are generally found on rivers and canals in Europe, and may be used for river cruises or permanently moored in one place.

Hotel barges came into being following the decline in commercial and freight carrying on the canals of Europe. Many working barges have been converted into floating hotels of varying degrees of luxury. This trend began in the 1960s and has now grown into a network of hotel barges operating on the canals and rivers of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK. The majority of hotel barges operate on the French waterways, where the national authority Voies Navigables de France estimates their economic importance at 60 million euros of local income, or roughly 5% of all waterway tourism business in France.^[1]