Shanghai government will monitor the price of local hotel rooms and find accommodations in neighboring provinces for the huge waves of visitors expected to attend the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, an Expo official told a forum yesterday.

The host city may be short of hotel capacity by as much as 400,000 beds a night during the peak periods and 60,000 beds on non-peak days, Huang Jianing, of the Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Coordination, said at a forum discussing the development of the service industry in the Yangtze River Delta region.

The 184-day Expo is expected to attract more than 70 million visitors.

The city government will begin to monitor the room rates at local hotels six months before the Expo in a apparent bid to rein in price surges caused by the huge demand, said Huang.

If hotel prices rise too high, rooms might remain vacant and visitors might shorten their stay, Huang said. Huang did not say, however, how organizers would define, or control, high prices.

The city also plans to send about 20 percent of the Expo visitors to neighboring provinces during peak times, Huang said.

Those areas can provide about 390,000 hotel beds for visitors. The organizers will encourage the provincial hotels to rent their rooms as a package, with Expo tickets and bus or train tickets to the site, Huang said.

(Shanghai Daily October 24, 2008)