A Brazilian hotel in downtown Belém recently went viral on social media after it “rebranded” for the upcoming COP30 climate alarmism summit and made its rooms 100 times more expensive — defying government efforts to solve the city’s exorbitant lodging prices ahead of the event, the outlet G1 reported on Thursday.
Brazil will host the COP30 summit in Belém from November 10 to 21. The government of radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spent extensive efforts to prepare Belém for the upcoming event — going as far as to reportedly provide credit lines for the construction of new hotels in the city and decimate thousands of acres of the Amazon Rainforest to make way for new highway routes to improve the Belém’s traffic. The event will feature state delegations and international organizations discussing “climate change” and other environmentalist causes.
Over the past month, Brazil’s COP30 Special Secretariat has been desperately attempting to address concerns by some participant nations denouncing that they are being charged “exorbitant” rates by Belém’s hotels, some as high as $700 a person. Brazilian law does not impose limits on daily hotel rates.
In a letter addressed to both the Secretariat and the corresponding United Nations officials, 25 participating nations pressured the Brazilian government to relocate the event to another city in light of the high hotel costs.
Brazilian officials told local outlets that “there is no possibility” of relocating the event and promised that the government will submit a report on August 11 to formally address the matter. Since then, the Brazilian government launched a 2,700-room program that seeks to alleviate the lodging issues, reserving the cheapest rates for the “Least Developed Countries.”
G1 reported on Thursday that one such hotel in Belém, originally named “Hotel Nota 10,” rebranded itself as “Hotel COP30.” The establishment’s management told G1 that the hotel, which is a 30-minute drive from where the climate event will be hosted, has received inquiries from foreign embassies and that most have been interested in renting all of the hotel’s 17 rooms at once.
According to G1, the three-floor hotel, which has no elevator, originally featured room rates as low as 70 Brazilian reais ($12.79), but raised them by up to 6,300 and 7,000 reais ($1,151 and $1,278). G1 visited the hotel on Monday, which has since lowered the rates. A double room with a private bathroom and double bed costs about 2,275 reais ($416) per night as of Wednesday. According to the outlet, the hotel only had two rooms available for viewing, with the rest either occupied or undergoing maintenance.
“It was a market test. No daily rates were sold at that price [7,000 reais],” Alcides Moura, a manager at the hotel, said.
According to the manager, the hotel was sold to new owners in August 2024, who commissioned a complete renovation, equipping all rooms with air conditioners, new furniture, and other amenities. The “COP30” rebrand, Alcides explained, “was a way of showing that Belém is involved in the event” clarifying that the hotel has no connection with the summit.
“If the government says that $300 is the ceiling, we will comply. But no one has said anything so far. Everyone wants to take advantage of the moment, and Belém also deserves this appreciation,” Alcides told G1.
The hotel appeared to respond to criticism after it went viral on Brazilian social media circles this week. In a statement published on its Instagram account, the “COP30” hotel clarified that its name is not a “change related to the climate event” but instead a “new phase for the venture.” The hotel asserted that it revised its pricing but stressed that “due to the high demand generated by the international event, there has been a general increase in rates across the city’s hotel chain, as is common in any city hosting large events.”
According to the Brazilian left-wing newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, hotels in Belém have refused to provide information to Justice Ministry authorities about the “exorbitant” prices charged for the COP30 event. Documents reviewed by Folha claim that at least ten hotel companies have failed to respond, “at least in part,” to questions posited by Ministry officials.
The newspaper listed the case of one unspecified luxury hotel specifically built for COP30 using a 20-million-reais ($3.65 million) credit line from the Brazilian federal government. The hotel reportedly justified its average daily rates of 15,000 reais ($2,743) by noting Belém’s lack of hotel capacity, “which the hotel was supposed to help remedy.”
“Certainly [companies] are applying an old law: supply and demand,” Antonio Santiago, head of the Brazilian Hotel and Industry Association (ABIH), told Folha.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here
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