The Tourpomoshch Association will send to the Russian Federation's supervisory authorities a list of outbound tour operators who systematically fail to provide reports on the number of tourists served and the average cost of a tourist product, Interfax reports, citing to Rostourism.
"After the amendments to the law on tourism activities came into force, requiring tour operators to provide data on the number of tourists served and the total price of the sold tourism product, Rostourism and Turpomoshch were faced with the fact that many market participants began to provide false information. The cost of the tourism product they declared turned out to be many times lower than the average market level, and the declared volumes of activity did not correspond to expert assessments of the scale of their business," the agency's website said.
Rostourism noted that such actions by tour operators lead to an understatement of the size of the personal liability funds they form, as well as the insured amount of civil liability. "All this entails the failure of tour operators to fulfill their obligations to tourists in the event of bankruptcy or termination of tour operator activities. An example is the situation with the Natalie Tours group of companies, whose legal entities had a total volume of financial guarantees of slightly more than 150 million rubles with total obligations to tourists of more than 1.5 billion rubles," the department reported.
Rostourism emphasized that earlier the head of the department Oleg Safonov gave the order to take measures to prevent tour operators from understating the size of personal liability funds and the amounts of insurance coverage within the framework of civil liability insurance for failure to fulfill obligations under the contract for the sale of a tourism product.
At the same time, the list of “problematic” tour operators included those who systematically failed to fully and within the timeframes stipulated by law to comply with the requirements for submitting reports to “Turpomoshch”, information on the total price of the tourism product, the number of tourists and the average cost of the tourism product in the field of outbound tourism.
“It was decided to clarify and adjust this list and send it to the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for inclusion in the plan for inspections of economic entities in 2019,” Rostourism concluded.
Source: trn-news.ru