Rostourism offers to create a competitor Booking
The proposal of one of the tour operators of Russia to restrict the Booking service in the country has been developed.
After the statements of the Ministry of Culture and Rostourism about the lack of authority to block the Internet resource, and the idea of “working out the issue” is nothing more than a “standard procedure having a technical nature”, a proposal was voiced to create a domestic analogue of Booking. This statement was made by the Deputy head of Rostourism Nikolai Korolev.
We would very much like to see a new modern quality resource created that would be registered in the Russian Federation in accordance with all the requirements of the law and act as a good competitive platform for resources such as Booking. Nikolai Korolev is sure that the Dutch service is an “unscrupulous” competitor of Russian tour operators.
Our Russian tour operators are responsible – we have about 1 billion rubles contributed to the responsibility funds of tour operators. Approximately 20 billion rubles insured various cases. On the other hand, what is our consumer protection on Booking.com? None at all”.
This is not about banning Booking. State Duma deputy Alexander Kurdyumov (LDPR) was the first to speak about the creation of his Booking. “Call the service whatever you want: Booking, Mucking, Hrucking, and most importantly – make it better and lure customers, no one bothers you!” he wrote.
Experts believe that this comment with sarcasm shows the main difficulty. In Russia there is a service for booking hotels - "Island". In 2016, the aggregator launched an advertising campaign with the slogan “Also Booking, but cheaper”.
According to experts, the domestic analogue will not be able to truly compete with the American resource. Ideas have long been discussed at high levels: back in 2014, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation announced that it was going to open a national system for booking hotel rooms in Russia, even Vladimir Medinsky reported at the hearings in the Civic Chamber and announced the desire of the authorities to finance the project, but it did not go beyond conversations.
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