When travel geeks hear about a big, new, important hotel coming down the line, they often start to make immediate plans to stay there (or at least stop by), because hey, big, new, important hotel ;-). Even if it’s not run by Hyatt, Marriott, IHG, etc., it may still be worth visiting, much like when so many people stopped by the TWA Hotel opened in 2019. But if it’s available with points, even better, right? (but remember kids, don’t visit a hotel the moment it opens…it’s a good way to be disappointed, if they weren’t really quite ready to open, after all)
Had these travel geeks started to make plans to visit North Korea’s Ryuyong Hotel, they’d still be waiting to go. The building is almost 40 years old, and it still hasn’t been finished.
Situated in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, the hotel began construction in 1987, with plans for it to have its grand opening in 1989. That would have coincided with the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students. The plan was for the Ryuyong Hotel to break the record for the world’s tallest hotel. At the time, that record was held by the Westin Stamford Hotel, which had opened in Singapore in 1986 and, more importantly to North Korea, had been built by a South Korean company.
Nearly 1,100 feet tall, with 105 stories, the Ryugyong Hotel was designed to have about 3,000 rooms (although some sources suggested 7,665 rooms) and five restaurants. The odd pyramid shape of the building, with three wings, may or may not have been as originally intended. From loveexploring.com:
…its unusual shape is not a thought-through design feature; the North Koreans didn’t have the advanced construction materials used in most modern skyscrapers and instead relied on reinforced concrete, so physics partially dictated the building’s form. To achieve the intended height, there had to be a large base and a tapered top to support the enormous weight of the building.
Despite organizers spending over $750 million on the project (that was about 2% of North Korea’s GDP), progress on the building has been stopped and started repeatedly throughout the years.
The building finally reached its planned height in 1992, but North Korea was experiencing an economic crisis at the time, and construction was stopped, complete with a crane left abandoned on top of the building.
PC: Misha / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 3.0
The Ryugyong Hotel stood there, untouched for the next 16 years. Much like Central Florida’s often-memed I-4 Eyesore, it loomed over the city, with an unfinished concrete exterior, by far the tallest but obviously incomplete building around.
That was around the time when the not-so-majestic structure got the nicknames The Hotel of Doom, the Phantom Hotel, and The Worst Building In The World.
In 2008, an Egyptian construction firm stepped in to do some of the work on the building. Between then and 2011, the crane was removed, and the Ryugyong Hotel, which by this time was being touted as a planned “mixed-use” structure, finally had a completed exterior.
North Korea said the building would be completed in 2012. It wasn’t.
In late 2012, German hotel group Kempinski announced that it would partially open the Ryugyong under its management the following year. In March 2013, the company pulled out.
Some small bits of work were reportedly done in 2016, 2018 and 2019. LED signs were also installed on the outside of the building.
“Heavily edited frames of the Ryugyŏng-Hotel LED Show” PC: tavernarkis / Wikipedia / CC BY 3.0
Nearly 40 years since work began, the hotel still hasn’t opened to guests – though one man who’s been inside the building says it’s nowhere near ready to open.
Simon Cockerell, general manager of Koryo Group, told CNN in 2019: “They took us into the lobby area, where there was a lot of exposed cement. Then we went (on) the one working elevator to the top, which was the 99th floor, I believe.
“It took a long time to get there, because it was a service elevator, not a modern elevator with a string of buttons. There was an elevator operator who determined where to stop. At the top we had a look around, took some pictures and went back down to the lobby again.”
According to Reuters, completing the hotel would cost over $2 billion. Good luck with that.
Photos of the inside/outside of the Ryugyong Hotel: CNN, 2019
Humorous video of the history of the hotel: Half as Interesting
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