When you’re searching for your next holiday, it’s unlikely you’re keeping an eye out for a place with ‘doom’ in the name.
Hotel of Relaxation? Sure. Hotel of Fun? Why not. But Hotel of Doom? There's no chance I'll be travelling there.
And it seems like a no from everyone else, as the nicknamed ‘hotel of doom’ that cost £600 million has apparently never had a single guest stay there.
Eerie images show inside the place in Pyongyang, North Korea, which building began on back in 1987.
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It was aimed to be open for visitors by 1989 but it didn’t totally go to plan. Actually called The Ryungyong Hotel, it has a bit of a weird pyramid shape, measuring over 1,000 feet in height with 105 storeys.
With millions and millions splashed on it, it’s been throughout over the years with halted building works and companies pulling out. So, it’s pretty understandable why the place has earned the nickname ‘hotel of doom’.
Very few people have actually been inside of the place with it still not being open to public despite the design for it to have a whopping 3,000 rooms for people to go into.
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Simon Cockerell is one of those to have had a rare glimpse inside of the Ryungyong as a general manager of a company specialising in North Korea tours.
He told CNN: “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 lift with a string of buttons. There was a lift 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.”
Cockerell shared these images while also discussing them on the Zoe Discovers YouTube channel in 2021.
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While he said there’s an ‘amazing view’ of outside, inside is ‘literally just a shell’.
The man added that they only went to the ground floor, ‘the biggest floor’, plus the top floor, ‘the smallest floor’. At the bottom, he says it was divided into ‘three sort of cavernous areas’ that appeared to have mezzanine areas.
Cockerell describes it as looking a bit like ‘the end of the world’.
“So it’s slightly creepy and weird but very quiet, very clean as well given that it was a construction site,” he adds.
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However, the bloke says he hasn’t seen any pictures of the inside since then but from glimpses from a far there’s ‘definitely something that has gone on’.
Well, it’s fair to say it’s unlikely most of us will ever be getting a first-hand look inside the ‘hotel of doom’.
Jess Battison