“If there were no preparations for the football Euro-2012, Ukraine would not have experienced for a long time the ‘hotel boom’ witnessed by us in 2011-12, especially in tournament host cities,” the Deputy Head of the Euro-2012 National Agency (Ukreuroinfraproekt) Valeriy Zhaldak has said in exclusive comments to the Information Centre Ukraine-2012. 

According to him, the state has organized favourable conditions for hotels construction in terms of quantity and quality in order to prepare country’s hotel business for the European Championship. “First, Ukraine has introduced preferential taxation terms for the hotels that have been built and rebuilt for Euro-2012. The state will suffer financial losses because it will get lower income tax from them, but the country will gain several times more from the tourists who will come and will be accommodated in these hotels,” Mr Zhaldak noted.

He has said that further support from the state was the mechanism developed by the government for compensating the interest on loans granted by banks to the hotels built and rebuilt for Euro-2012 for their construction, reconstruction and re-equipment. “It was decided in 2011 that eight hotels will get compensation of this kind from the state for a total sum of 46 million hryvnyas. It has resulted in an additional 1,300 hotel rooms in host cities for Ukraine,” the deputy head of the Euro-2012 National Agency emphasized.

Valeriy Zhaldak reminded that 9 hotels with 1,044 rooms were opened in Ukrainian Euro cities in 2011. In their turn, 49 hotels with 4,900 rooms are planned to be put into operation in Donetsk, Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv Regions in 2012. “They will enable tourism in Lviv and Kyiv to further develop, along with promoting business in Kharkiv and Donetsk,” the Euro-2012 functionary summed up.