BEIJING, November 3. /TASS/. The majority of hotel reservations for the period of the FIFA 2018 World Cup in Russia were made by citizens of the United States, China and Mexico, a Moscow city administration official told Russian reporters during his visit to China on Friday.
"At present, we see by the number of booked rooms that Chinese fans are the second biggest group of fans. Accoriding to our data, 22% of all hotel reservations are made by US fans, while 16% are from China, followed by Mexico with 15%," said Alexei Tikhnenko, the head of the Hospitality Board at the Moscow Sports and Tourism Department.
"At the moment, some 60% of available rooms have already been booked. This figure, of course, includes official delegations and journalists, but the bulk of reservations were made by fans," he said.
Tikhnenko said last month that Moscow had more than 1,000 hotels with a total of 63,000 rooms. Along with hostels, those facilities were capable of accommodating a total of 163,000 people at a time. Another 11 branded hotels with 3,000 rooms are planned to be built this year. City authorities also expect around 100 inexpensive hotels and hostels to open before the World Cup.
The 2018 FIFA World Cup will be held between June 14 and July 15, 2018, in 11 Russian cities - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Saransk, Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Sochi and Rostov-on-Don. The opening game and the final will be held at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium.