New Hotel Law Has Room for Lovers

Clandestine lovers and apartment renovators across Russia have one less bureaucratic hurdle to clear under new government regulations requiring hotels to accept all guests regardless of their permanent residence.A government housing official said Monday that a new set of rules forever buries a Soviet-era regulation forbidding citizens from staying in hotels in their own home towns."Why should it be forbidden? What if you have started renovations and you need someplace to sleep?" said the official, Lev Gavrikov.He said he did not know the reason behind the old rule, which hotel managers attribute to everything from a shortage of rooms to an assumption that anyone renting a hotel room in his own city was up to no good."Maybe they were trying to be moral, so that hotels would not give space to lovers," said a spokeswoman for the luxury Metropol Hotel. She said the Metropol stopped checking residence permits in 1991.Larisa Sokolova, senior administrator at the shabby, Soviet-style Minsk Hotel on Tverskaya Ulitsa, said the Minsk had also long since dispensed with the prohibition on Muscovite guests."We have the following rule: if you pay, you live here; if you don't, you don't," she said.Gavrikov said hotels were still obliged to check guests' residence permits to register foreign guests, who in Moscow are required to pay daily visitors' fees."Of course, they have to check your passport data -- what if someone stays at the hotel and then commits a crime or steals?" he said.Guests will be relieved to know that the new rules require hotels to provide certain services free of charge, including: calling ambulances if needed; changing sheets and bathroom supplies twice a week; providing first aid kits; delivering mail; returning lost possessions; and placing wake-up calls.They must also provide boiled water, needle and thread, and one set of dishes, and are forbidden from charging more than 25 percent of their nightly fee to reserve a room.The popular daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets said the new rules meant "an end to the outrage that is now going on in Russian hotels." But Gavrikov denied there was a widespread problem with hotels overcharging, refusing to change guests' sheets or demanding extra fees to call ambulances."There is no problem," he said, adding that the new rules were designed "just so that consumers will know their rights."Representatives of the Minsk, which charges Russians 50,000 rubles (about $25) a night, and the Metropol, where rooms cost over $300, said their hotels provided all the required services for free regardless of any regulation.