To attract more travelers from abroad to our country the procedure of crossing the border should be simplified, the head of the Federal Tourism Agency Oleg Safonov believes. In his opinion, the fee for tourist visas should be decreased or canceled at all, IA Interfax reports.
Safonov is assured that sooner or later internal tourist flow will stop growing, as it has its reasonable limits. Bearing this in mind, attention should be paid to external tourism. The official representative explained that overall, there are more than one billiard of tourists in the world, and this industry branch is growing by 5 percent annually. Each year tourists from other countries leave 12 billions of dollars in Russia.
The chief of the Tourism Service informed that a draft for further tourism development had been already submitted to the government. The first stage is to develop infrastructure in different regions, the second stage is to simplify visa procedures.
The head of Rostourism believes that lower visa costs might increase tourist flow to Russia by 40 percent, and online services will simplify the procedures. “We have very fierce competition with foreign countries. If a tourist sees that there is a non-visa country, they will definitely go there. We should do everything that this tourist would choose visiting country”, Oleg Safonov underlined.
Russkiy Mir
