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Hainan hotel rates reach new highs

By Jin Zhu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-09 07:07

With the Chinese New Year holidays just a few days away, hotel prices in the country's only tropical island province have touched a record high.

The average price for a single night at five-star hotels in south China's Hainan province has reached a whopping 10,000 yuan ($1,400) during the seven-day Spring Festival break, which kicks off Saturday.

The cheapest room at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Sanya is going for 18,400 yuan, while the most expensive is 34,500 yuan per night. Prices for a room at the Hilton Sanya Resort range from 11,138 yuan to 16,048 yuan, according to ctrip.com, a leading travel website.

The prices almost equal the average annual income for Chinese city dwellers in 2009, which stood at 18,858 yuan per person, figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show.

"Sanya has been a hot destination for travelers for long. With the Spring Festival approaching and the recent influx of real estate speculators, hotel prices are soaring," said Zhang Baoquan, chairman of Antaeus Group, the developer of Yalong Bay Mangrove Tree Resort, a high-end hotel in Sanya.

"But I never expected hotel prices to go so high," he added.

Zhang said the average price of a room during the slow season was around 1,200 yuan per night, which had "recently gone up sevenfold".

It is "normal for hotels to raise room prices by three or four times during the peak seasons", he said.

"But the increase in Hainan is far from normal. I have never seen so many hotels raising their prices by such a huge margin at the same time," he said, adding that even the island's mid-level and low-level hotels were now charging 3,000 yuan to 5,000 yuan for a night.

The skyrocketing room rents have even scared away a few travel agencies.

"We are not paying too much attention to the Hainan market this year since most ordinary people cannot afford a room there," Wen Qian, deputy general manager of GZL International Travel Service, was quoted as saying in Guangzhou Daily.

Wen said a majority of tourists to the island this year will be officials, who will make use of public funds to pay off staggering hotel bills.

"Living in a high-end hotel in Sanya for one night is now the same as spending four to five days in some overseas destinations. Other than government officials, there is hardly anyone else ready to pay so much money for a domestic holiday," he said.

"The few who are willing to take a trip to Hainan are wealthy businessmen, who can take their families for a relaxing vacation and at the same time check out the island's real-estate market," Wen said.

Hotel prices have not seen such a massive jump during the Spring Festival holiday since 2002, when the average price for a room in the island reached about 8,000 yuan per night.

"This is a special year for Hainan, as the country recently unveiled plans to turn the place into a top international tourist destination by 2020," Zhang said.

However, he added that with several new hotels opening up soon, prices were bound to stabilize by the next Chinese New Year.