In 2021, Rostourism received almost 200 complaints about Russian hotels, the level of service of which did not correspond to the declared one. In the resort areas of such hotels, there are hundreds, or even thousands, and they sometimes award the “star” category to themselves.
Most often, Russian tourists encounter problematic service at Russian resorts when they choose a three-star hotel, but get comfort at a two-star level or lower. Rostourism complained about such hotels in the Crimea, the Krasnodar Territory, in the Leningrad Region, Izvestia was told in the department.
According to Alexan Mkrtchyan, general director of the Pink Elephant travel agency network, the “star rating” of hotels in the country is overstated, especially for hotels of the three-star category and below.
“In the “fours” and “fives”, the level of service almost always corresponds to the declared one. Nevertheless, I know five-star hotels that do not have a pool – and in the “fives” this cannot be, ”he said.
The head of the legal commission of the Russian Union of Travel Industry (PCT), Georgy Mokhov, added that sometimes the expectations of Russian tourists do not coincide with reality because they compare “three stars” in Turkey and “three stars” in Russia. According to him, our hotel classification system has many parameters that are not obvious to the consumer: formally, a hotel can correspond to its category, but the food was tasteless, the rooms were rarely cleaned, and the room was cold.
From January 1, 2022, hotels cannot operate without passing the classification. Voluntary order is preserved only for sanatoriums. At the same time, the classification does not guarantee “stars” – the hotel can receive the category “without stars” (there are more than 400 such objects out of 900 in Crimea). Last week, the agency for the first time withdrew accreditation from the organization that assigned stars to hotels. There are 167 of them in total, and about 5% are now suspected of dishonesty.
Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:
Three with a minus: tourists accused almost 200 hotels of fake stars
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