The Rostourism have terminated the right of the Luk Tour Travel Company to engage in all tour operating activity

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   According the preliminary information the new 4* Holiday Inn Sokolniki Moscow will welcome its first guests at the end of July –the beginning of August. The foundation was laid ten years ago, however, only two years ago when the hotel passed into the ownership of the Bank of Moscow and the English company Intercontinental the hotel moved off dead center. Andrey Podkopaev, Sales Department Director of Holiday Inn Sokolniki Moscowsaid that the hotel is now 90% prepared to welcome guests: ‘the new hotel is bigger than the other hotels within the Holiday Inn chain – 523 rooms, conference hall for 700 people. Besides, price-quality relationship is better – a standard single room, excluding breakfast, including taxes, will cost 8, 600 rubles (around 300$). The hotel is mainly aimed at businessmen and big groups of wealthy tourists’.
    Meanwhile, representatives of Russian incoming companies, interviewed by a BANKO correspondent, agreed that a new 4* hotel in Moscow will not considerably improve the situation on the market of incoming tourism. However, Elena Mikhailova, General Director Deputy of Rosa Vetrov, said: ‘at the peak of the season we sometimes lose 25-30% of potential tourists owing the shortage of hotel rooms. Therefore, we are happy to have any amount of new rooms’.
   Furthermore, according to Sergey Romashkin, General Director of Dolphin Travel Company, there are enough hotels in Moscow with the same level of prices: ‘it is not a sensation for the market. There will be one more hotel for wealthy tourists. Holiday Inn Sokolniki will not make a positive impact on the shortage of hotel rooms’. Mikhail Romanov, Director of Orpheus Travel Agency, ‘high accommodation rates do not allow to prepare a mass-market package’. ‘There are no investments in inexpensive hotels owing their long pay back period’, commented Ilya Klubnikin, Marketing Director of RVB-Arlean.