The Summer Olympics open in Beijing this week on the auspicious date of 8-8-08 which will be fine for marriages but will not be viewed as a lucky date by Beijing hoteliers. Because they are not full.
There won’t be nearly enough visiting heads on hotel beds during Beijing’s big event.
There will be about 43,000 visitors. But 13,000 new rooms have already been built in the Chinese capital, and the new inventory is expected to reach 30,000 by the end of the year. Using back of the envelope calculations — or Fermi equations if you want to sound superior — you can see this means a glut of empty rooms.
The glut is particularly noticeable in Beijing’s luxury tier, where there are about 50 five-star properties, up from fewer than 20 five years ago.
Chinese tourism officials admitted earlier this month that almost half of the city’s four-star inventory was still available for the Olympics period. (The illustration is of an Olympic ice skater which is more attractive than an empty hotel bedroom.)
Source: MSNBC