The Austrian city of Vienna is set to house 350 Ukrainian refugees in a luxury hotel in the centre of the Austrian capital as the country struggles to accommodate refugees and asylum seekers.
The 350 Ukrainian refugees, all women and children, will be residing in the currently vacant Hotel de France, located on the famous ring road that circles the heart of the city.
According to Austria’s Interior Ministry, a total of 25,921 Ukrainians live in Vienna currently but the vast majority, around 80 per cent, are currently living in private apartments, rather than hotels or migrant centres, Kronen Zeitung reports.
However, inflationary costs have led to a lack of available housing for refugees, leading to the 350 women and children being placed in the luxury hotel, which had previously been used to house travellers undergoing quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic.
The accommodation for the Ukrainian refugees comes as Austria lacks space for asylum seekers crossing illegally across the Balkan route and has been forced to erect tent camps in certain areas of the country.
Around 40 tents, which can house up to eight people each were put up at three different points along Austria’s border with Slovenia last month as Austria’s capacity to house 8,000 had already been filled.
The deployment of the tents for asylum seekers has been criticised by some, including in St. Georgen im Attergau, where local mayor Ferdinand Aigner rejected a federal government plan to erect 17 asylum tents in the town and went on to reject a proposal to build container housing to house 130 asylum seekers.
Austria has also seen a surge of migrants applying for asylum this year, with the country reporting 70,000 asylum applications from January to September, a number approaching the levels of the 2015 migrant crisis, which saw 90,000 applications.
The majority of the arrivals in Austria come across the Balkan route to Europe, which has seen a huge surge of activity this year, according to the European Union border agency Frontex, which reported in October that numbers had increased by 170 per cent compared to last year.
“The Western Balkan route continues to be the most active migratory route into the EU with 19,160 detections in September, twice as many as a year ago. The high number of illegal border crossings can be attributed to repeated crossing attempts by migrants already present in the Western Balkans,” the agency said.