Three stars to the rescue

With 5-star hotels having a hard time filling their rooms and the expenses on business trips being dramatically slashed, the developers and operators of budget hotels are just trying to hold their nerveMladen Petrov Tallinn is believed to be one of Europe’s best kept secrets: a lovely city with beautifully preserved mediaeval architecture, pricey-but-good restaurants and only moderately inundated by tourists. In addition, Tallinn now offers such affordable hotel accommodation that a number of Scandinavian newspapers have branded the capital one of the cheapest cities in Europe in terms of accommodation prices. And they weren’t exaggerating – a night in one of the 5-star hotels will set you back only EUR 95, while in 4-star hotels you will be charged around EUR 65. Quite a deal. Despite the generous discounts hotel operators are offering, in Tallinn they are complaining that their assets a