By Yuri Chernyakevich
The Ice Hockey World Championship clock has already begun its countdown. Just a few months remain until thousands of visitors will arrive in Belarus. The sports holiday will begin in May, but already, tourists and fans are reserving rooms in hotels and calculating how much they will pay to stay in the Belarusian capital. So how much will foreigners be spending to stay in a Minsk hotel? The answer to this question can be found by means of the popular sites Booking.com or Hotel.by.
A single room in a Minsk hotel without a category will cost from $16 a night for one person. Two and three star hotels offer rooms starting from $60 to $150 a night. By comparison, a five star hotel will cost from $250.
Those who want to rest, not only in comfort, but also wish for prestige, will certainly choose the President Hotel. The cheapest hotel rooms, the Double and Double Premium are $330 and $350 respectively, whilst a double, two-room Suite costs $510. All rooms of the hotel come with minibars, climate control systems, floor heating, two phones and free Wi-Fi.
It is clear, that not every tourist could fork out that kind of money for similar rooms. Therefore, low-cost rooms will certainly be in no less demand. Sport Time Hotel, which is near Minsk-Arena has such accommodation. The hotel has 134 rooms, and nearly 300 people can stay here simultaneously. The cheapest room costs under $35, the most expensive is around $85.
One more, rather cheap accommodation option is a hostel, where visitors can pay as little as $14 per night. The Jazz hostel, which is located near Komsomolskoye Lake and Dream Land Entertainment Park, is $17 per person for a room for 5 people and $14 for an 8 person room. In another hostel, Postoyalets, where each room has Wi-Fi and a TV, the prices are about the same. A cot in a room for 8 will cost $17.
Besides this, hockey fans could also rent a room in the so-called ‘fan-villages’. These are hostels in the student quarter on Dzerzhinsky Avenue. Potential tenants will be attracted by the prices which range from $10 to $30 a night.
However, these are today’s prices. It is difficult to say what will happen to them in the spring. We know that, during Euro-2012, the prices for accommodation in the capital of Ukraine, Kiev, went sky-high. But experts predict that in Belarus such greed will not happen. “If the prices for hotel rooms in Minsk rise for the Ice Hockey World Championship, it will be to a very little degree,” the Director of the Tourism Department of the Ministry of Sports and Tourism, Vadim Karmazin, said at recent press conference. “The matter is that, last year the official operator TsentrKurort and the basic municipal hotels of Minsk concluded the memorandum in order not to raise prices during the World Championship by more than 10 percent in Dollar terms. In total, more than 30 hotels and 12 hostels will be involved in accommodating fans.”
Hockey fans from other cities will not remain without a shelter. Now there’s only one thing left for them to do — arrive in Minsk and support their favourite team.
