Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law on the introduction by tour operators of data on vouchers into a unified information system of electronic vouchers. The document was published on Saturday, May 28, on the official portal of legal information.
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According to the document, travel operators that sell tours without entering data on booking and paying for a tourist product in the electronic system “at the end of each calendar month” may be excluded from the unified federal register.
In addition, it is supposed to charge a fee from the tour operator for placing an electronic voucher in the system, as well as to provide for the onset of administrative responsibility for the sale of a tourist product without the formation of an electronic voucher and placing data about it in the system.
If the operator does not fulfill these obligations, you can apply to the personal liability fund of the company under the association “Turpomoshch” by attaching a receipt of the electronic ticket to the application.
The system should ensure the exchange of information between Rostourism, Rospotrebnadzor, the Financial Guarantee Fund, the Federal Tax Service, banks and insurance companies, tour operators and travel service providers.
The Federation Council approved the law on May 25, before that, starting from 2018, the electronic voucher was used by travel agents and tourism service operators in a voluntary format.
On May 20, Vice-President of the Russian Union of the Travel Industry, CEO of Vipservice, Dmitry Gorin, said that tour operators began to offer travelers an alternative to non-working bank cards abroad – a deposit that the client can use to pay for the services of a hotel or other host. Now the company offers the service in 11 countries of the world, and this list is expanding, said the representative of the tour operator.
At the same time, on May 13, it became known that trips to Turkey for this summer have become up to 30% more expensive compared to 2021. The representative of the operator clarified that the most expensive month when booking a trip now is June: prices for tours jumped by 30%.
Meanwhile, according to the rating of prices in sanatoriums for the summer, provided by the “Sanatorium of Russia”, the upcoming season may become a record for domestic health resorts. The leader among the cheapest destinations was the Trans-Baikal Territory, where the average price per day is 2980 rubles.
Earlier, on April 27, Russia announced its intention to withdraw from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
A week earlier, Alexander Baiborodin, a member of the legal commission of the Russian Union of Travel Industry, said that he had said that a fraudulent scheme was now widespread in which clone sites of large foreign hotels were created. You can check the reliability of tour operators using the register of tour operators on the website of the Federal Agency for Tourism, which is in the public domain.
Since 2020, a program for selling tours with cashback has been operating in Russia, under the terms of the promotion, you can return 20% of the cost of a tour around the country, but not more than 20 thousand rubles. For 2022, within the framework of the national tourism project, 5 billion rubles have been allocated for the implementation of the cashback program. Part of the funds is planned for the spring stage of sales, part – for the autumn.