Inside £1.6 billion hotel which has NEVER had a single guest

Inside £1.6 billion ‘tower of doom’ hotel which has NEVER had a single guest

  • Located in Pyongyang, Ryugyong Hotel was meant to open over 25 years ago

This hotel has never had a single guest, despite costing a whopping £1.6billion to build. 

Located in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, Ryugyong Hotel was meant to welcome its first guests over 25 years ago. 

The hotel has been compared to ‘Mordor’ due to its pyramid-shaped structure and its standing in one of the most impoverished countries in the world.

Construction on the hotel initially began in 1987 and – had it been completed on schedule two years later – it would have opened as the world’s tallest hotel. 

The Ryungyong Hotel in North Korea is the world’s tallest unoccupied building with 105 empty storeys

The hotel has been compared to ‘Mordor’ due to its pyramid-shaped structure and its standing in one of the most impoverished countries in the world.

READ MORE: The world’s WORST white elephants: From the £4bn ‘People’s House’ in Bucharest that displaced 40,000 locals to build to the 1,082ft ‘Mordor’ hotel in North Korea (not forgetting the £6m Marble Arch mound)

Now, it has the rather more unwanted record of being the tallest unoccupied building in the world instead. 

3,000 rooms were planned to have been built in the hotel, which would have seen them spread across the three-winged building. 

However, work was paused on the hotel in 1992 as North Korea endured an economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union that year. 

After a 16 year pause an Egyptian contractor, the Orascom group, took over the project and revived construction in 2008, according to Reuters. 

Following the extended hiatus on developing the hotel any further, exterior glass panels were then installed in July 2011. 

This development led to reassurances from North Korean officials that the hotel would finally open in 2012 – which was pushed back to 2013 after another delay. 

Throughout this period, German luxury hotel group Kempinski was set to oversee management of the site, but withdrew mere months after taking it on, stating that it was ‘not currently possible’ to be in the North Korean market at the time.  

Of course, any hopes that the hotel would eventually open in some capacity failed to materialise, with the hotel believed to be completely empty inside to this day. 

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