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| Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman visited Lotte Hotel Seoul on early Thursday morning, where he booked more than one-third of the hotel's entire suites for his one-night stay. Yonhap |
By Ko Dong-hwan
Visiting Seoul Thursday for high-profile meetings with President Yoon Suk-yeol and the country's business leaders, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman has raised public curiosity. People were particularly curious about where he would stay during his visit and how sumptuous the lodgings for "Mr. Everything" would be.
The crown prince, 37, made himself at home at Lotte Hotel Seoul, a plush establishment in the downtown area of Jung District that previously attracted many state visitors including Indonesian President Joko Widodo and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The crown prince, according to reports, booked about 400 rooms for two weeks. While he stayed at the hotel for just a few hours after arriving, his chaperones needed extra time to prepare his suite ― securing his belongings that were shipped here earlier this month in dozens of huge container boxes and unpacking them ― and will repeat the procedure in reverse after his business here is done.
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| Mohammed bin Salman, left, is received by South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo upon his arrival in Seoul, Thursday. Reuters-Yonhap |
Salman himself is staying in the hotel's Executive Suite, a luxury 460 square meters-large room that costs 22 million won ($16,400) per night. The hotel in 2018 spent 4.1 billion won in renovating the suite's bedrooms (equipped with Simmons' top-grade beds), dining room (with a Carl Bechstein grand piano), powder room, dress room, meeting room set up for video-conferencing, as well as a home bar and a hinoki sauna.
Salman reportedly chose Lotte Hotel Seoul because they have the most suites among the hotels in the city. It offers 1,058 rooms to customers. His aides are known to have contacted several major hotels in Seoul last month and inquired whether renting more than 250 rooms at once was feasible. The prince also reportedly rented 200 vehicles for local transport.
The crown prince's is known internationally for his astronomical wealth estimated at over $2 trillion including his collection of gold supercars and a super yacht worth $400 million. Crown Prince Mohammed, the seventh son of King Salman, became the country's prime minister in September after serving as the defense minister from 2015. The purported goal of his latest Seoul visit is to develop plans to spend the oil-rich state's $450-billion fund for building a smart city project there, a project named NEOM, with the services of Korean firms including Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor Company and Hanwha Solutions. The prince met the CEOs of the firms at the hotel on Thursday afternoon.
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