Moscow says goodbye to Russia

Instead of the demolished hotel “Russia” near the Kremlin will be built a parliamentary center. It, according to officials, will house the Federation Council and the State Duma. It is reported that the decision was made, now negotiations are underway on the transfer of the facility to the management of the affairs of the President of the Russian Federation, which will have to deal with construction.

This means that Moscow travel agencies, seven years waiting for the construction of new hotels on this site, hoped in vain, and Moscow will remain an acute shortage of affordable hotels. This has a negative impact on the tourist flow.

Four twelve-storey buildings of the hotel “Russia” under the conditional names “south”, “west”, “east” and “north” with a 21-storey high-rise in the center of the latter were put into operation in 1967. Hotel "Russia" even got into the Guinness Book of Records as the largest in Europe (at that time). But in 2004, the Moscow mayor’s office decided to demolish “Russia” and in its place to build not one building, but a whole block of small hotels for about 2 thousand seats. A tender was announced, which won a certain development company. But as a result of the rivals’ decision to challenge it, and then the disputes between the investors themselves began, the plot of land with the hotel demolished by 90% returned to the city’s hands. So far, there has been no change on this issue.

And at this time, the situation on the hotel market in Moscow deteriorated sharply, hotel prices grew up, and the inbound tourist flow fell significantly. Almost simultaneously with the "Russia" were demolished and a number of other 3-star hotels. With their demolition, the niche of cheap capital hotels was almost empty. Inexpensive hotels left on the market immediately raised prices to $75-130 for a standard single room.

And now that it turned out that new hotel complexes are not worth waiting for, Moscow travel agencies are afraid to predict the prices of existing hotels and guess the number of tourists who decide to go to Moscow for such money.

The idea to build a parliamentary center instead of Russia belongs to the new mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin. The construction of such a center contributes to the creation of a single complex of protected buildings located from Russia to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which will be very convenient in terms of political and business communications.

Photo from:http://koxinor.mambor.com/teksty.htm