Once-Exclusive Prague Hotel for Party Bigwigs to Open Doors to Public--for Price

A Prague hotel so exclusive that not even a visiting millionaire could get a room has thrown open its imposing doors and plans to go commercial.

For eight years a veil of mystery hung over the Praha Hotel, property of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and reserved for the exclusive use of its officials and visiting foreign dignitaries.

Now, however, it has been opened to outsiders, ending one of many taboos swept away after weeks of popular unrest that forced the party to relinquish its monopoly on power.

Inside the Praha’s doors are palatial suites, a luxury sports center and a theater--where officials enjoyed private screenings of Western films they had banned for the public.

Hundreds of uniformed staff glide noiselessly through its long corridors, but because of the severe restrictions on entry there has rarely been a guest to be seen.

“Now things will be different,” manager Jan Dite told Reuters in what he said was his first interview with a Western correspondent. “We’ll have to get used to it.”

Management said the hotel, built in 1981 at an undisclosed cost, will go commercial early this year--although it will remain the property of the party.

Ordinary rooms will cost about $100 a night, enough to burn a hole in the pockets of Westerners and certainly beyond the reach of ordinary Czechs.

But the move is at least a concession to opposition demands that party members forfeit privileges that include not only use of the hotel but also special health care and access to secret stores stocked with luxury meats and dairy goods.

Dite admitted that the hotel had been losing money since it was built but would not say how much.

“We were subsidized from the party’s budget. Our average occupancy rate has been less than 50%,” he said.

The six-story, horseshoe-shaped building has a tropical garden in its central atrium. Room balconies--all of which face south--offer an exquisite view of the once royal Hradcany Castle and chandeliers light its grand marble staircase.-

The 116 rooms with terrace gardens include 32 “small” and eight “presidential” suites. A small suite is actually bigger than many family apartments in Prague. The manager graciously declined to show any of the presidential suites.

The hotel can sleep 200 people and employs a staff of 350, Dite said.

Facilities include a circular indoor swimming pool, a well-used bowling alley, pool tables, a sauna, tennis and volleyball courts, a beauty shop, a cinema and a massage parlor.

But its miles of wood-paneling, hundreds of black leather armchairs and public rooms resembling vast caverns exude the grim, moody atmosphere of a place that is too big and too empty.

Only during party congresses and on other special occasions has the building ever come to life.

At those times the hotel teemed with officials. Fleets of chauffeur-driven Tatra limousines would wait outside to take them to the congress in the Palace of Culture, another huge structure nicknamed “Moby Dick.”

For years locals eyed the hotel, built on the site of a former public park, with a mixture of awe and resentment.

They told tales of 18 underground floors, private elevators to suites, a secret tunnel from the subway stop nearby, wild parties and call girls.

None of those stories could ever be verified, however.