A GLOSSY brochure was pushed under the door of my hotel bedroom in Hong Kong the other day with the headline: "There is Still Room at the Inn."
It contained a long list of hotels - 13 on Hong Kong island and 37 in Kowloon - with vacancies for the period of the handover of the territory to China at midnight on June 30th. So much for the dire warnings of about a year ago that all hotels in the territory had been fully booked since 1993.
This time last year, anyone who could actually find a room was quoted inflated rates and told they must pay in advance. It seemed then that nobody without a booking had any chance of a seat at one of the last great historic spectacles of the 20th century, the handover of Britain's prize colony to communist China.
But now the hoteliers are pleading for custom. They have shot themselves in the foot, it seems, having miscalculated the laws of supply and demand.
Many hotels turned away clients in the hope of lucrative package tours which failed to materialise. Then Hong Kong emigrants, who made mass bookings on the assumption that they had to be in the territory to claim permanent residency, cancelled when it turned out not to be true.
At the end of April, 23 per cent of rooms were vacant, down 8 per cent on normal. There were also rumours that all flights to Hong Kong were booked up for June-July, but this applied only to some US cities with large Chinese populations, according to Ms Jenny May, manager of Tour East in Hong Kong. Ms May said there were so many scheduled flights from Europe and Asia with empty seats that "I cannot see the possibility of anyone being unable to get here for the handover".
VIPs to attend include the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, and the foreign ministers of 40 nations, including Ireland. But after July 1st, everyone leaves, complained my hotel manager. "Those tourists who are coming want to be here for the last days of empire, not the first days of Special Autonomous Region of China."