- By : Mr. Lajpat Rai
- Date: 22-08-2013
- Views : 1966
- [Comitancillo, Guatemala]
Brazil tourist board has complained that FIFA official hotel booking service is advertising rooms at up to five times their normal price for stays during the World Cup.
The average cost of a hotel room in Rio during June and July this year was only £145, based on figures from Trivago, the hotel booking website.
But Brazil's tourist board, known as Embratur, found that the majority of rooms being sold by MATCH, the FIFA-appointed accommodation agency, were two to three times more expensive, with average rates of £300 a night between June and July, 2014. It also claimed MATCH is charging a fee of up to 40 per cent on top of the price of a hotel room, something MATCH has denied.
It means football fans heading to Brazil can expect to pay considerably more than those who attended the last World Cup. Average room rates in Rio during the tournament will be £298 a night - double the average rate charged by hotels in Johannesburg for the 2010 competition.
Embratur has made Brazil’s justice ministry aware of its concerns and also criticised MATCH for imposing minimum stays of two nights at World Cup hotels.
The highest increase it reported was from a hotel in the north-eastern city of Salvador, where prices leap by 583 per cent, from £56 to £325 a night.
Flavio Dino, president of Embratur, said: "Embratur is committed to working closely with the tourism industry in Brazil to ensure visitors get as fair a deal as possible during their stay here. This involves close monitoring of price changes in the industry, and a recent survey we conducted found there was excessive price increases in some hotels, with some cases of price rises of over 500 per cent."
He said Embratur has contacted individual businesses to ask them to "re-evaluate their pricing system" and is confident they will respond positively.
"We are also working closely with MATCH, the company appointed by FIFA to provide accommodation," he added. "They are charging a fee of up to 40 per cent on the price offered by hotels and we are urging them to lower this."
MATCH, however, told Telegraph Travel it operated with margins of between 10 per cent to 30 per cent and that these fell "within the norms of the industry". It said its average margin was 15 -18 per cent.
A spokesman said MATCH, along with FIFA, "would welcome any attempt the government would make to help us lower prices", but said it believed that, "in the vast majority of cases hotels are already providing room rates for the World Cup that are in line with the rates they achieve outside premium periods."
He said MATCH had not yet seen Embratur's research, but said that it was of the "utmost importance to ensure accommodation is made available to all FIFA World Cup working groups and visitors at fair prices and on reasonable terms of sale".
If England qualifies, as many as 25,000 English football supporters are expected to join more than 600,000 international fans in Brazil for the World Cup matches.
Aside from the issue of supporters being put off travelling by expensive room rates, the Brazillian tourist board may also be concerned that cities such as Rio could suffer from the same, post-event tourism slump that London did, largely due to inflated hotel prices, following last summer's Olympics.
Rates at some hotels in London were up to 10 times higher than usual a year before the Olympics began, although they did fall sharply as the Games approached when the demand did not match previous predictions.
Telegraph Travel conducted its own research into the rates of hotels in Rio de Janeiro listed on FIFA’s official booking website hotels.fifa.com.
Of those that we tested, the price offered by FIFA during the World Cup was substantially higher than the price offered through the hotel’s own website for a similar room in the month beforehand. We found we could not book rooms through these hotel's own websites for stays during the World Cup.
