Deputy Prime Minister Vu Khoan has approved a list of 19 hotels in Hanoi to serve the Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit 2006 (APEC), which will be held this November.
The move aims to help the hotels prepare for the event as well as prevent the shortage of luxury hotel rooms at the time of the summit.
Among them, nine hotels selected to serve high-ranking delegations include the Sofitel Plaza, Daewoo, Nikko, Melia, Sofitel Metropol, Hilton Ha Noi Opera, Horizon, Sheraton and Thang Loi.
Other large hotels such as the Hanoi, Fortuna, Capital Garden, Sunway, De Syloia, Hoa Binh, Bao Son, Lake Side, La Thanh, and Guest House 77 Hung Vuong, with 1,200 rooms, will be used to receive foreign press.
From early-2006, as many as sixty APEC-related conferences, in addition to fairs, exhibitions, and meetings, will be held, with the one-week APEC 2006 summit scheduled for mid-November.
The capital city expects to receive thousands of high-ranking officials to attend the summit during the time, according to preliminary figures from the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
To well prepare for the forthcoming APEC Summit - the most important political event of Vietnam this year, Deputy PM Khoan asked the selected hotels to urgently upgrading their facilities and not to accept outside bookings during the APEC high-level week.
However, the major city hotels expressed concern that they were yet to be apprised about the expected number of tourists and their periods of stay, said Cao Thi Ngoc Lan, deputy director of Hanoi’s Tourism Department.
A manager of another 4-star hotel said the agencies should inform them early about the guests allocated to hotels and their period of stay so that hotels could also better serve other guests.
Hanoi now has some 400 hotels, including 100 hotels of one-to five-star-standards. Its nine five-star hotels are the Sofitel Metropole Hotel, Daewoo Hotel, Somerset West Lake, Nikko Hotel, Sofitel Plaza Hanoi, Hilton Hotel, Horison Hotel, Sofitel Plaza, Melia Hanoi, and Sheraton Hanoi Hotel.
In 2006, an expected number of nearly 1,000 qualified hotel rooms and some dozen of high-end villas will be put into operation. However, Hanoi’s tourism watchdog said the city needed an additional 10,000 rooms to serve conferences and international-scale political, cultural, and sports events by 2010.
VNA, Liberated Saigon
Vietnamese
