Tourists were given time to collect – Newspaper Kommersant No. 43 (7488) dated 03/15/2023

After the withdrawal of the bill of the State Duma deputies on the tourist tax, the Ministry of Economy will create the basis for this mechanism. The fee can now be fixed as a tax payment integrated into the cost of living. Market participants call the collection an untimely holiday tax, where it is now adopted on an experimental basis, the payment can be collected from only 20% of travelers.

The Ministry of Economy will prepare its own version of a bill on the introduction of a tourist tax, three sources in the market who know about this from ministry employees told Kommersant. President of the National Union of the Hospitality Industry Alexei Volkov told Kommersant that the Ministry of Economy is working on a document, but the process will be lengthy, and all points will probably be agreed no earlier than the end of 2023. The ministry, according to him, has initiated work in connection with the requests of the regions, which will be able to set the amount of the fee themselves, and the bill will set only a limit figure, which has not yet been determined. The Ministry of Economy “Kommersant” did not answer.

Now the resort fee as an experiment exists in the Krasnodar, Stavropol, Altai Territories. St. Petersburg may join the list of regions, while the mechanism was abandoned in Crimea. The fee is charged to tourists for each night of stay and is not included in the room rate. It is paid mainly upon check-in, the operators are accommodation facilities. In Sochi and Belokurikha, the resort fee is set at 50 rubles. per day, in Kislovodsk – 100 rubles. In the fall of 2022, State Duma deputy Andrei Markov submitted a bill giving all regions the right to introduce a resort fee of 100 rubles, but on March 13 this year, the document was withdrawn from consideration.

According to Alexei Volkov, the bill of the State Duma deputies caused a lot of comments at the discussion stage, in particular because of the untimeliness of the measure, which could lead to an increase in the cost of living in an overheated market. The interlocutor of Kommersant in the tourist market connects the decision to postpone the introduction of the tourist tax with the upcoming March 2024 presidential elections in the Russian Federation. There were no fundamental comments on the mechanism proposed by the deputies from business and officials, says a Kommersant source.

Mr. Volkov believes that the Ministry of Economy can fix the tourist tax in the legislation as a tax payment in order to integrate the tax into the cost of living.

Deputy Chairman of the Union of Tourism and Hospitality Roman Yeremyan calculated that with a collection of 100 rubles. per day, which tourists will pay for 50% of the nights in collective accommodation facilities, we can talk about 13 billion rubles. in year. But, Mr. Yeremyan notes, it is not known whether the payment will be the same for a hostel client for 500 rubles. per day and a guest of a high-budget hotel for 50 thousand rubles. per day.

Alexey Volkov says that the funds from the collection are planned to be directed to the budgets of municipalities for the development of tourism infrastructure, the creation of cultural sites and points of attraction. In his opinion, fundraising should increase after giving legal status to guest houses. But Aleksey Kozhevnikov, a member of the public expert council of the tourism national project, says that in the Krasnodar Territory in 2022 only every fifth guest paid the resort fee. In general, he considers the time for new payments to be unsuccessful, pointing out that the average profitability of the hotel business, according to the Federal Tax Service for 2021, was 5.1%, and, in his opinion, the necessary indicator for development is 20%.

Vadim Prasov, vice-president of the Federation of Restaurateurs and Hoteliers, says that the world needs a tourist tax to regulate the problem of overtourism, which is mainly created by foreign tourists. And in Russia, the collection resembles a certain vacation tax that is taken from Russians, although until recently they were stimulated with the help of “tourist cashback,” he points out. Tour operators, according to Dmitry Gorin, vice-president of the Russian Union of Travel Industry, do not support the introduction of the fee, as in the experimental regions, hoteliers point to high administrative costs, check-in queues and image losses.

Alexandra Mertsalova