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Your Tibet room is ready for US$1,000
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CHINA has unveiled a new hotel, where the presidential suite costs US$1,000 a night, as part of its drive to get tens of millions more tourists to visit Tibet.
With views over the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas, the luxury Artel hotel is a potent symbol of Chinese plans for the autonomous region.
Tourism officials are hoping visitor numbers will rise by nearly 50 percent in the next four years, said Wang Songping, deputy director of the Tibet Tourism Development Commission.
“Tibet attracted 4 million Chinese tourists in 2005. We hope we’ll get 24 million this year and 35 million by 2020,” he said.
The 103-room Artel opened last month in Lulang, a picturesque village situated at 3,700 meters in a southeastern forested area in the autonomous region. It is part of a tourist complex built in an old part of town that now boasts its own shopping street, a lake and an arts center.
Nicknamed the “Switzerland of the East,” the village is regarded by authorities as a flagship project for its ambitious plans for Tibet’s tourist sector.
Transport links are being developed to cater for the influx, including a motorway opening next year, and a high-speed rail line from the capital Lhasa, expected to open in 2021.
Another high-speed rail line to Chengdu, capital of neighbouring Sichuan Province, home to more than 80 million people, should be completed in 2022.
Wang said the number of Chinese tourists, who currently make up 95 percent of visitors to Tibet, had increased by an average of 20 percent each year since the 2006 opening of the first railway linking Tibet to the rest of China.
The hotel, owned by Poly, a Chinese state-owned group, has invested 280 million yuan (US$42 million) in the project, said commercial director Ray Peng.
Its guests will be mostly Chinese. Less than 5 percent of visitors to Tibet are foreign tourists, who need to obtain an “entry letter” as well as a Chinese visa to go to the region. “These restrictions are in place because we can’t yet provide world class services for tourists,” said Bianba Zhaxi, deputy governor of Tibet.
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