President Viktor Yanukovych ordered his government on April 6 to prevent hotels from charging exorbitant prices for fans attending the Euro 2012 soccer tournament.
Some hotels in the four cities hosting matches are charging up to 10 times their normal rates. In the city of Kharkiv, beds in a hostel are going for €250 ($330) a night, according to the local organizing committee for the June 8-July 1 tournament being shared with Poland.
Yanukovych called on his infrastructure and economy ministers to ensure that hotel prices are brought to “economically grounded” levels. He did not specify how the order would be enforced.
Officials of UEFA, the sport’s European governing body, have said that curbing hotel prices remains the biggest obstacle in organizing the tournament.
Euro 2012 operations director Martin Kallen warned in February that very high prices in some hotels in Ukraine may give the country and the tournament a bad image.
Critics say that price gouging will portray Ukraine as a greedy country and may hurt its tourism industry for years to come at a time when the government tries to boost tourism to help the country’s struggling economy.
“Poverty breeds greed,” Infrastructure Minister Borys Kolesnikov said last month. “But we in the government will find ways of exerting influence on their business appetites.”
It is unclear, however, how hotels will be forced to lower their prices.
“From our end we can only make recommendations. We cannot affect hotels’ price policies,” said Albina Krasnodemska, spokeswoman for the Euro 2012 organizing committee in Ukraine.
