Hotel rooms for the Beijing Olympics were sufficient, according to a senior city tourism official on Monday, adding bookings by domestic visitors remained low through July.

"Hotel bookings during the Olympics will steadily increase while the room rate would drop a bit but not too much," Xiong Yumei, the Beijing Tourism Administration (BTA) deputy director, told a press conference.

Since last August, the administration has surveyed 800 star-rated hotels each two months. It found the booking rate through July of star-rated hotels was 1 percentage points higher than at the end of May. The average room rate, however, dropped 6 percent.

The booking rate of downtown hotels was higher than those in suburbs, she said.

Rooms in four-star to five-star rated hotels were mostly booked by foreigners, while domestic visitors mainly chose hotels at or below three stars, the survey found.

"Domestic booking remained quite low at the end of last month," Xiong said.

The survey revealed about 45 percent of domestic visitors who planned to watch the Games in Beijing would stay at the homes of friends or family. Of the rest, only 10 percent had booked hotels by July.

"But we expect the bookings will have a notable increase from Aug. 7 to Aug. 24, especially at hotels of and below three stars," Xiong said.

Beijing currently has 5,790 hotels with 665,000 beds. It has also promoted 598 Olympic home-stay families whose residences are near the venues.

The administration said last week 400,000 to 450,000 tourists were forecast to come to Beijing from other countries and other parts of China during the Games.

(Xinhua News Agency August 4, 2008)