A travel company’s representative said at the moment visitors can hardly find luxury hotel rooms in Hanoi as almost 90 percent of the rooms have been in use over the last two months despite the average rent price of USD 160 per room per day.

According to CBRE Vietnam’s survey, the average rent price of five-star hotel rooms in Hanoi increased 34 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of this year and the booking rate of these rooms is always high.

As a result, many travel companies had to cancel their tourism contracts. Deputy Director of the Hanoi Tourism Department, Cao Thi Ngoc Lan, said that is why the number of Chinese visitors to Hanoi decreased.

Apart from negative impacts of the global economic crisis, the shortage of luxury rooms and high rent prices are attributed to the decrease of international arrivals to the country. In the first nine months of the year, the number of foreign visitors to Hanoi reached 960,000, a year-on-year increase of only 5 percent.

According to the Hanoi Tourism Department’s statistics, Hanoi now has 8 five-star hotels and 27 hotels of three or four stars with a total of 5,000 rooms. Most of these hotels are working at full capacity with 85-95 percent of the rooms in use.

Hanoi is expected to receive about two million foreign arrivals, which means that it will need 7,000 luxury rooms. Thanks to its preferential investment policy, Hanoi is receiving numerous luxury hotel–building projects. However, with the newly licensed projects, by 2010 the city may have only 2,000 more rooms.

Of the projects, Accor, a French corp., has officially launched the construction of Novotel Hanoi on the Park, its fifth hotel in Hanoi, which is considered a resort in the city. Other large projects of the Republic of Korea and Japan’s investors are also underway.

It is estimated that for the next five years at least USD 2.5 billion will be poured into real estate projects in Hanoi.

Once operational, these projects will help address the shortage of luxury hotel rooms in the capital city.