Open Sky without "black holes"
In recent years, the tourist market of Kazakhstan has a fever. Big players go bankrupt, business owners escape from the country with cash. All of this hits the image of tourist agencies. Some of them can’t withstand such a shock and close. According to the official representative of ATAK (Association of Travel Agencies of Kazakhstan) Denis Krivosheev, this branch of economy, which employs 2.5 thousand agencies may simply disappear in 2-3 years, if we won’t not intervene in this situation. 25 thousand people will be left with no work.
- See what happens during the last three years: after the collapse of major players such as “On Travel”, “Gulnar - Tour", "Diamond tourism", and now “Travel System”, the business is losing up to ten million dollars. And due to the fact that this is a low-margin market, a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from this.
- As far as it is known, ATAK has officially warned about the threat of bankruptcy of Travel System a week before the incident. Why did no one take any action?
- Nobody would listen to us, and at first began to blame that we do not understand anything and create panic. Before that, we met with the head of Travelsystem Roman Khan to verify if our fears were justified. He tried to assure us that all is well. But we knew about their problems with the airline SCAT and "ground" debts.
- ... And a week later the default has occurred. How did you manage to react quickly and to take the matter under control?
Due to changes in legislation, we have been able to understand and to identify who owes whom and how much. Separation of tour operators and travel agencies made the system open and transparent. After learning about insolvency of Travel System, we have managed during a very short time, literally overnight, to collect all the lists of victims. We knew where people were. Partners, state agencies joined the team of the operational headquarters. We have our representative in Turkey to regulate issues on the spot. We work closely with Czech representatives. All “fire" issues are resolved. People return home. Time interference, anti-crisis measures of ATAK have helped avoid panic and negative consequences.
- In your opinion, what should be actually done to improve the situation?
Market is very specific. There are many rules of the game and variables. The intervention of the state in it will only aggravate the situation. In the tourism business, there are two main problems. One of them expensive air fare. It is necessary to "open" the sky for competing airlines. If low-cost operators will enter market - it will be fine. The second problem - insurance. We offer to insure tourists from three major risks: failure to depart - if the company can’t provide funding, a traveler can buy a ticket at any time on arrival and request money spent on ticket through an insurance company, non-deployment in a hotel upon arrival etc. It's - a good and a new tool for insurance companies. Only self-regulation of the market and insurance will help to eliminate incidents and it will put everything in its place. Insurance companies will know for sure, which travel companies are reliable and which are not.
With this offer we want to address to NCE in order to develop jointly the modular amendments to legislation that would regulate the new relations in the market. Then, there will be no need in a separate law on tourism, if everything is insured – the Code of Civil Procedure will cover it. Since all entrepreneurs operate within the Code of Civil Procedure, we believe the tourist market should function without specific industry laws. If we do not do this, then 25 thousand people will remain on the streets. It is mostly women with higher education, with knowledge of languages, which are involved in an active economy. Yes, as long as they work for the "garbage". But the time will be time when they will focus on development of in-bound tourism - to bring tourists from other countries. And then we risk losing a whole layer of the economy.
In this difficult time it is important to consolidate absolutely all market players. For this purpose, we are creating a Union of tourism industry, which will include all associations, tour operators, agencies and hoteliers. Only together we can overcome all difficulties and to reform the tourist market.
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