Tibet's first luxury hotel opens

The St. Regis Lhasa Resort, the first international luxury hotel in Lhasa, the regional capital, covers nearly 32,000 square meters and is a green hotel.
Wang Songping, deputy chief of the region’s Tourism Administration, said, "The opening of St. Regis ends Tibet’s history of no luxury hotels. Shangri-La Hotel and InterContinental Hotel will be built in Lhasa in 2010. High-end hotels will help boost Tibet’s tourism."
During the first three quarters of 2010, tourist arrivals in Tibet rose 22.6% from a year earlier to 5.8 million.
English.News.cn reports the remote southwestern region witnessed a tourism boom in the past few years, especially since the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet railway on July 1, 2006 — the first rail link between Tibet and the rest of China.