Park Royal Palace at the ready

A new Viennese hotel set to start business will also feature apartments, it has been revealed.

Bosses of the Park Royal Palace – which will open next Tuesday (11 October) – confirmed speaking to the Kurier newspaper today (Weds) that the four-star hotel will include flats. The businesspeople explained that the apartments were located on the fifth and sixth floor of the six-storey building which is situated in the Penzing district next to the Technical Museum.

They said that the flats’ sizes ranged between 130 and 180 square metres and offered a view on Schönbrunn Palace, one of the Austrian capital’s most popular sights. Asked about how much the monthly rent was, the hotel managers revealed it would range from 2,600 and 3,600 Euros.

The Park Royal Palace features 233 rooms. All of them are according to its managers, already fully booked next week. Building the four-star resort cost 45-million Euros, the Kurier reports today. The daily paper’s article also discloses that guests will be charged for 140 Euros and more per night.

The Park Royal Palace project is only one of many new hotels about to open in Vienna. Signa Holding boss Rene Benko revealed in August that the city will get its first Park Hyatt hotel in two years’ time. The construction of the five-star hotel – which will also include a large Prada shop – started recently.

Vienna’s hotels and guesthouses will feature around 60,000 beds by the end of next year, according to the Economy Chamber (WKO). The city’s thousands of hotels registered around 1.18 million overnight stays in August – more than ever before in that month.

Especially the number of overnight stays by people from China (plus 50 per cent) and Russia (plus 21 per cent) shot up from August 2010 to the same month of the current year. Approximately 81 per cent of the more than 54,000 hotel rooms on offer in the capital were occupied in August 2011. More than 30 million overnight stays were counted in Austria between May and July 2011.

Meanwhile, Hans Schenner of WKO’s hotel industry department announced he was confident that a majority of Autria’s hotel managers and restaurant chiefs would be able to look back on a pleasant business activities this summer.

Lakeside hotels, restaurants and bars struggled in July when a cold snap dominated the weather in the alpine countries before hot temperatures returned the next month. September also featured many sunny days. The same can be said about the first few days of the current month. However, chilly conditions are predicted for the coming weekend which could herald the definitive arrival of autumn after some regions in higher altitude were blanketed in snow already last month.