Column by Alexandra Mertsalova about the problems of matching the service and the cost of placement

“Expensive and bad” — under this slogan, almost every tourist season begins in Russia, if you follow the reviews on social networks. Not only resort hotels, but also locations near Moscow can fall under the scope of negative travelers. Thus, the industry portal Tourdom spoke about the experience of tourists who were offered to pay 227 thousand rubles. for two days at the Emerald Forest Hotel.

According to a survey by Otkritie Bank, 75% of Russians consider vacation prices in Russia too high, but only 4% never go on vacation in the country. It is not surprising that federal officials also become participants in seasonal discussions about the quality of recreation.

For example, on Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko proposed to work out and implement ratings for collective accommodation facilities, on which the pricing procedure will also depend. There is still no understanding of how exactly this mechanism will work, but the main idea is simple: low quality placement should not be expensive.

In the hotel market, this idea was accepted quite expectedly indifferently. After all, hoteliers face verbal interventions at the beginning of the high summer season every year. In 2021, Rostourism announced a website where tourists could complain about the inflated cost of accommodation. And the then head of the department, Zarina Doguzova, even went to Anapa as a “mystery shopper”: the quality of the service she received was not up to par. Last year, Dmitry Chernyshenko instructed to monitor prices in hotels, anticipating overstatements. But the market failed to find out exactly which indicators are considered excessive and what sanctions will be applied in case of violation. The only conclusion that entrepreneurs can draw from the annual statements is that the problem has long been known, but how to solve it has not yet been figured out.

The introduction of a system of mandatory classification of hotels, from the point of view of consumers, has not yet yielded the expected results: the criteria exist, but the objects receiving “stars” do not always meet them. The issue was resolved by itself for a long time due to the presence of a monopolist in the online booking market – Booking.com. The portal, according to Bnovo estimates, accounted for more than 80% of hoteliers’ sales, the current performance of its competitors is disproportionately lower. The dominant position allowed the platform to generate a large amount of reviews by conducting its own ranking of objects. Now, tourists themselves have to collect information about objects based on reviews on disparate resources. The Russians seem to have to get used to such a situation. The problem may be solved with the appearance of a player with a market share comparable to Booking.com, but there are no prerequisites for this yet.