The Russian government considered it inappropriate to create a state analogue of Booking.com, Rostourism told Izvestia. The issue has been worked out by the department together with the Ministry of Digital Development, the expert and business community since March, when Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko gave a similar instruction.
“Now in our country there are about 90 online services for booking hotels, short-term rental of apartments and other tourist services, including sites such as Ostrovok, Yandex.Travel, Bronevik, Tutu.ru, 101HOTELS .COM and others. We believe that the role of the state in this segment is not to compete, not to replace business, but to create conditions for the development of such services in the country,” the Rostourism stated.
Earlier, the head of the Federal Tourism Agency, Zarina Doguzova, also named the analogues of the Airbnb service for short-term apartment rentals that curtailed work in Russia – according to her, these are Avito and CIAN.
Services for renting tourist accommodation Booking.com and Airbnb announced their withdrawal from Russia in early March. At that time, they accounted for 70% and 10%, respectively, of all requests from Russian tourists to search for services for booking hotels. This follows from a study by the All-Russian Popular Front (ONF) based on requests from Russians in the Yandex search engine. Yury Barzykin, vice-president of the Russian Union of Travel Industry (PCT), agreed with this assessment.
By the end of June, Booking.com’s share of queries had dropped to 24%, Airbnb to 2%. And the joint share of Russian services, such as Ostrovok, Yandex.Travel, Tutu.ru, etc. increased from 20% to 74%, follows from a study by the ONF on the development of the domestic tourism market.
Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:
Crushed reservation: Rostourism rejected the idea of creating a state analogue of Booking.com
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