The barrier for the travel industry
Kazakhstan will toughen requirements for the tour operators and travel agencies
The concept of the bill for outbound tourism has already been prepared and submitted for approval to the concerned state agencies. This was announced by Director of the Department of Tourism Industry of the Ministry of Investment and Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan Timur Duysengaliev. "We want to adopt a package of measures, which minimizes the risks for citizens. In the second place, it affects representatives of tourist industry ", - he said. For this purpose, the draft law provides for a mechanism of financial guarantees. "A company that wants to enter the market of outbound tourism, will be obliged to provide a solid financial guarantees that would, in case of an incident, a collapse, allow a company to use the funds that were deposited by the company at a bank or in some reserve fund, to solve the problem of tourists, who being trapped in circumstances can remain there", - said the director of the Department.
Timur Duysengaliev agreed with the opinion that the adoption of this law will put a barrier, not only to insolvent tour operators, but also for start-up companies in the tourism sector without significant start-up capital. "Yeah, companies will have to undergo serious conditional selection immediately", - he said.
According to the Head of Department, after approval of the concept will development of the bill. "The procedure is quite long, but we hope that by September this year we will submit it to the Mazhilis, somewhere in January (2016), it has to enter into force ", - said T. Duysengaliev.
Answering the question about the dynamics of the Kazakhstani complaints on the actions of unscrupulous tour operators and travel agencies, the head of the Department noted that "the flow of complaints usually starts with the beginning of the season." "When Travelsystem collapsed, we received a great number of complaints right away. But we stated officially that we will help everyone, we need to get a written statement. But no citizen, no company sent us a complaint", - said Duysengaliev.
He noted that defrauded customers prefer "to complain by phone or via the press". "But when we say, contact the authorized body, write to us specifically - we will forward your appeal to the Prosecutor's Office, Interior Ministry and other bodies, we can’t help without an appeal. In this regard, we see that the legal culture is not yet at an appropriate level, people like to solve the problems by phone", - noted T. Duysengaliev.
According to him, in Kazakhstan today there are about 2,000 tour operators and travel agents.
Zhanar Birlikkyzy
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