The domestic tourist is the laziest tourist in the world. To buy a tour, he turns exclusively to a tour company. In the West, similar behavior is typical only for wealthy people. The public with average income searches for tours on the Internet. The World Wide Web is full of advantageous offers that allow significant savings on vacation.
Our fellow citizens, wanting to save money, go at most to a “last-minute tours” shop. The result: foreigners with an active lifestyle vacation significantly cheaper than us. The first conclusion is that domestic tour operators, spoiled by lazy consumers, take advantage of their monopoly position and inflate prices. Is that so?
Representatives of the tourism business, naturally, categorically disagree with this. “This is a myth that can be refuted. It is enough to browse the websites of foreign agencies and compare them with similar offers from our operators,” says Dmitry Danilenko, a representative of the information tourist service “BANKO.” “Hotel owners really do give the same Germans higher discounts. But the reason is not nationality, but that German companies operate with large tourist flows.” Organizations involved in consumer protection consider this statement biased. “Domestic tour operators inflate prices for tourists with particular greed,” believes Alexey Koryagin, General Director of the Agency for Consumer Protection. “We have very many intermediaries in tourism. But the tour companies themselves also build complex schemes to avoid taxes: they create 5-6 subsidiary tour companies, which are liquidated after some time. It is simply impossible to trace what happened in these companies and what prices tour operators set for them. In tourism there are still no real mechanisms for protecting consumers. Hence the inflated prices and scam companies.”
• There is a way to arrange a wonderful vacation without overpaying tour operators. Many of our fellow citizens have paid attention to the Black Sea resorts and independently organize their holidays in Gelendzhik or Anapa. They stay both in sanatoriums and boarding houses, as well as in the private sector. The benefit is obvious – the sea is just as salty, the sun is just as hot, and the price of a package is significantly cheaper than a trip abroad.
The journalists decided to check everything in practice and tried to independently select a tour option to the most popular country among our tourists – Turkey. So, we are going for a week to Bodrum, to the five-star hotel “Samara.” Domestic companies will charge $1,160 for a single room, $875 for a double. If you go on a trip in a higher season (for example, mid-August), you will have to pay $1,224 and $928 respectively. But the website of a Turkish travel company offers to relax in the same hotel for $66 per day for a single person, and $88 for a double room. Simple calculations show that a week's stay at the “Samara” in a single room will cost $462, and a couple – $308 each. In addition, you will have to pay for the air ticket. But even here there were plenty of favorable offers. The savings, as they say, are obvious.
In European countries, for example in Greece, due to the euro it is difficult to achieve such demonstrative savings. If, say, you book a room at the Crete hotel Candia Maris (5 stars) from home, a single room will cost $1,439, a double – $967 per week. If you go the direct route, the cost will be lower – $1,099 and $847 respectively. It seems a little – but still savings. True, they are almost completely “eaten up” by air tickets. But even here you shouldn't despair. On the Internet we found several Greek sites that offer big discounts (30-50%) if you book the hotel with their help. According to experts, such generosity is the result of the fact that such firms work exclusively on the World Wide Web, saving significantly on maintaining numerous offices and staff.
For the first time I thought about the greed of tour companies – to put it mildly – in May of this year. The long holidays we had due to the prolonged process of solidarity of the working people allowed us to get away on vacation. My choice fell on the Indian province of Goa. Imagine my surprise when for a tour usually offered for $900, they asked me for $1,500. They explained the huge difference by saying that during holidays the prices of local operators increase significantly. They didn't convince me: after all, May 1 is celebrated on a grand scale only in the former Soviet Union, and our tourists don't make any difference in Goa, since they make up less than 3% of the tourist flow.
Already on the spot it turned out that the first half of May also falls at the very end of the season, when most hotels are filled at best 30%. And this, as is known, also does not stimulate speculation on demand. For example, in my hotel a day cost $30. That means a 10-day stay would cost $300. Even if you add the cost of the ticket, it doesn't add up to $1,500.