This research project develops the first transaction-based hotel index for the European market, increasing transparency for stakeholders like hotel owners, financiers, and investors. The index tracks price changes, evaluates performance, and enables benchmarking. Using the hedonic regression methodology and a sample of 1334 hotel transactions from 2007-2020, the study finds that in 2020, European hotel prices decreased by 11.1%. The impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the European hotel real estate sector is thus significantly smaller than the -30% drop associated with the 2009 global financial crisis.