Estonia, Good for Business, Legislation, Tourism

Recently, several big international hotel chains have shown interest in entering the Estonian market or expanding here. "Although there have been news recently about the possible coming of new hotels and hotel chains to the market, several of them mean just an interest towards Tallinn, not a real plan of action," said Mutso, adding that the only ongoing developments he can point out are the Hilton hotel which is being built in the place of Reval Park Hotel & Casino that was demolished, and will have 202 rooms and that will be opened in 2016, and the Estoria Hotel with 93 rooms that will be opened this year.

"This isn’t actually a lot, considering that there were a bit over 6,300 rooms in hotels in Tallinn last summer and that number stayed unchanged since 2009," he said, adding that now the number of rooms is even smaller since Reval Park Hotel & Casino was demolished and Palace hotel is under reconstruction.

"There is certainly room for new hotels," the director added.

He said that outside Tallinn, new accommodation establishments will soon be opened in Pärnu and Narva-Jõesuu and several SPAs have decided to improve their accommodation quality.

Mutso said that the Estonian state tourism development plan for 2014-2020 prescribes an increase of accommodation possibilities, setting an aim that by the year 2020, the number of overnight stays of foreign tourists has to grow to 5 million nights in accommodation establishments, which is by 31% more than in 2012 when the number was 3.8 mln.