Beijing won't intervene on inflated hotel rates
21/06/2007 |
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BEIJING, June 21 (Reuters) - Beijing will not intervene in the pricing of hotel rooms during the 2008 Olympic Games, the city's tourism chief said, amid reports of exorbitant room rates and dwindling supply more than a year before the opening ceremony.
Barring an extreme situation, authorities would let the market decide hotel rates, the China Daily on Thursday quoted Du Jiang, Beijing tourism administration director, as saying.
An "extreme" case would be if "a foreign visitor was being asked to pay $10,000 for a room despite a hotel having plenty of vacancies," Du said.
"At present, reservations are steadily coming in and the prices appear acceptable to both sides. So the administration has no plans to intervene."
Du's comments came after local media reported that some Beijing hotels were quoting rooms up to 10 times above rack rates, or the listed price of a room before any discount.
Many more are already booked out, having allocated 70 to 95 percent of rooms to Beijing Olympic organisers, sponsors and clients.
Du said Beijing, currently with 280,000 hotel rooms and another 57 hotels opening next year, would be able to accommodate the 290,000 people that Olympic organisers expected would need rooms every day of the Games.
But the supply of star-rated accommodation was a concern.
"More and more domestic travellers want to stay at star hotels instead of cheaper, unrated ones," he said.
More than 2 million domestic and foreign visitors are expected to visit Beijing during the Games.
Gleeful price-gouging and supply-side concerns are a hallmark of host-city preparations leading up to the Olympics.
Authorities in Athens pressed residents to open their homes to strangers to meet accommodation demands years before the 2004 Games, only for hoteliers to slash rates to fill vacant rooms weeks before the opening ceremony.
(Source: Guardian.co.uk)
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