| The prosecutor's office will force bed owners to come out of the shadows On the eve of the new summer season, the Sochi prosecutor's office conducted a total inspection of private hotels. They are also called mini-hotels, but neither the first nor the second name of these resort enterprises can be considered official: Russian legislation does not yet distinguish between a private residential building and a house built by a private owner for the purpose of making a profit by renting out furnished rooms to guests. That is, all Sochi mini-hotels, as well as mini-hotels in other Russian resorts, are virtual enterprises. All of them are registered as ordinary individual residential buildings (IZHS). Therefore, employees of the prosecutor's offices of Sochi districts, when checking “private hotels,” actually visited individual housing construction, focusing solely on the external features of the houses. If in front of them stood a 4- or 5-story “skyscraper” made of glass and concrete with rows of balconies and air conditioning units on the walls, then there was no doubt that this was a hotel.
According to Sochi prosecutor Alexander Sergienko, the inspection is still ongoing, but 300 private hotels have already been identified. It should be noted that for the first time in the history of the resort, Mr. Sergienko named a number determining the size of this “alternative” and practically shadow sector of the Sochi economy. Until now they have talked about it vaguely - “big”, and, by the way, the local administration still finds it difficult to answer the question: how many people do private hotels accept, what kind of turnover do they have and what kind of profit do they make? However, private owners have long been seriously competing with the “official” resort, luring away a huge number of vacationers. According to the estimates of the prosecutor's office, in the three hundred mini-hotels taken on a pencil basis there are about 15 thousand beds (in the entire “official” Sochi there are 60 thousand beds). Last summer, you had to pay from 300 to 700 rubles per day for each place in the private sector, depending on comfort. In “official” Sochi hotels and boarding houses, people paid 100-200 rubles more for exactly the same or even worse living conditions.
But the prosecutor's office took on the Sochi private owners not at the request of angry competitors, but in order to force them to share income with the state within the framework of the current legislation. Almost all owners of hotels disguised as individual housing construction pay the same penny taxes as grandmothers who rent out beds in their apartments to vacationers. Likewise, they pay for electricity and utilities at residential rates, not commercial rates. For example, a cubic meter of water costs the owner of a private Sochi hotel 3.37 rubles, while the “official” Zhemchuzhina hotel pays 11.14 rubles for the same cubic meter. Hence the low prices in mini-hotels, which in this situation could be even lower. And the “official” resort, according to the managers of sanatoriums and boarding houses, simply cannot reduce the cost of its services due to taxes and other payments.
Last year, the Adlerkurort sanatorium-resort association (3,000 beds) paid 8,728 rubles to various budgets and funds for each of its beds, and Mr. Chakiryan, the owner of a private hotel with 50 beds, located next to the Adlerkurort, according to prosecutor's inspection, paid only 684 rubles for each place. That is, Mr. Chakiryan gave the state 12.7 times less money than the “official” health resort, although he charged people almost the same amount for accommodation - 700 rubles per day (in the Adlerkurort, a place in a similar room cost 750- -800 rubles).
If we manage to “regulate” the elements of the private hotel business, then prices for accommodation in mini-hotels will naturally increase. The private owner will then be able to exist only due to a higher level of service than in “official” health resorts, while maintaining the same cost of services. Time will tell what the outcome will be. In the meantime, the owners of private hotels are frightening the Sochi authorities with forecasts of a sharp reduction in the number of people wishing to come to the resort. However, they themselves are afraid of this even more than the authorities. Igor GLANIN, Sochi |
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