‘We haven’t been able to sell the hotel located in Antey Business Center’s third section yet. There are no customers for the building at the moment, so reality actually contradicts our government’s declarations of things getting better. In fact, nothing is getting better; the economy is still falling down and hasn’t hit the bottom yet. Once the bottom has been reached and some certainty arrives, customers might take an interest in the hotel. Right now this isn’t the case,’ Antey’s owner Andrei Gavrilovskiy announced at a round table discussion on hotel estate management in Yekaterinburg.

Meanwhile, the hotel was offered for sale as early as February 2009. Gavrilovskiy said the company’s management had been negotiating with Hilton for rendering them the management of the hotel then.

‘We did consider some franchising options earlier. However, once we learned about all the conditions that globally recognized hotel chains put forward, we decided to give up on the idea,’ he explained.