Plenty of rooms left for Olympics

By Xin Dingding | China Daily | Updated: 2008-05-29 13:27

More than half of Beijing's four-star hotel rooms and an even bigger percentage of lower-rating accommodation are still available during the Olympic Games, a tourism official said yesterday.

Xiong Yumei, deputy director of the Beijing Tourism Administration, cited a regular monitoring system in Beijing when she announced that 56 percent of all four-star rooms were yet to be booked.

Xiong predicted that hotel rates would become "more rational in the days to come", with just 44 percent of four-star rooms booked and an even lower percentage of three-star accommodation taken up.

"The rates of three-to-five-star hotels will increase less than 500 percent (during the Games) than the same period last year," Xiong told a press conference.

Standard rooms at Beijing's Grand Hyatt hotel will be the most expensive during the Games at 7,910 yuan ($1,140) a night.

But that's only double the fee for the same time last year.

All five and four-star hotels will charge a rate less than 5,500 yuan a night during the Games, she said.

The monitoring system showed 46 five-star hotels had 77 percent of rooms already booked for the Games at an average nightly rate of 3,263 yuan, a year-on-year increase of 260 percent.

The average rate of four-star hotels will increase 360 percent to 2,226 yuan, while three-star lodgings will spike 420 percent to 1,556 yuan.

Zhang Huiguang, the administration's director general, denied the low booking rate derived from foreign tourists' safety concerns.

Hotel rooms to date, she said, have mainly been booked by individual tourists.

She reiterated that Beijing has ample accommodation for the expected tourist influx.

Zhang said the capital is expecting 450,000-500,000 arrivals from abroad during the Games, between 30,000 and 80,000 more than would normally come during the same period.

Zhang said the recent Sichuan earthquake is unlikely to affect numbers.

With a total of 5,892 hotels, including 815 star-rated hotels with a total capacity of 660,000 beds, Beijing will offer more accommodation than both Sydney and Athens did during their Olympics.

Additionally, the administration has launched an Olympic Homestay program last month to accommodate about 12,000 foreign visitors, she added.

The program will select 600 to 1,000 families who meet requirements, such as a spare room and a member fluent in a foreign language, by June 15.

Each family, charging 400 to 600 yuan per day, will be able to host two foreigners at a time.

The government will be responsible for equipping each family with a fire extinguisher, a disinfection cabinet and towels for guests, she said.

Zhang said 200,000 people employed in the tourism industry, including taxi drivers and waiters, have been trained in both English language and etiquette.

Elsewhere, the installation of multilingual signs has been completed at 60 major tourist attractions, while most scenic sites and hotels have added facilities for easy wheelchair access.