Translated material
The tour operator has depleted its capital
Hundreds of Russian vacationers will stay at home
Clients of the Capital Tour company will not be able to go to warm seas today, and at least tomorrow. One of the largest tour operators in Russia announced yesterday that it is temporarily unable to “fulfill its obligations for all tours with a check-in date after November 17, 2010 (inclusive).” The news shocked the market especially strongly because just a couple of hours earlier Capital Tour had reached an agreement to unblock accounts with the Moscow Credit Bank (MCB) and the travel company’s partners managed to breathe a sigh of relief.Now “Capital” asks them “until special notice” not to send tourists who have paid for tours, starting from November 17. At the same time, the general director of the company, Inna Beltyukova, expressed hope that the situation would be resolved within two days.
The company promises to return funds “in accordance with the procedure established by law” for services not provided.
The problematic tour operator in reality operates through two legal entities: Capital Tour LLC and Capital Tour Company LLC. According to official data, their liability is insured for a total of 160 million rubles. Whether this money is enough to pay off all clients or not depends on how many tours Capital Tour and its numerous agents managed to sell for the next few days. Yesterday, even the relevant departments - the Ministry of Sports and Tourism and the Federal Agency for Tourism - failed to obtain such information, which created a special group to study the situation around the Capital Tour.
A disruption in the work of Capital Tour occurred in the middle of last week, when one of its creditors - MKB - filed a claim to collect overdue debt and, in order to secure this claim, secured the arrest of the company's accounts. Information then appeared in the press that the tour operator’s debt to MKB amounted to 45 million rubles, and the total debt to banks (including Master Bank, Globex and Rosbank) amounted to 1.3 billion rubles. A representative of MKB yesterday, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostei correspondent, neither confirmed nor denied the amount of Capital Tour's debt.
Capital Tour has not released official information about the scale of its operations these days, but it can be gleaned from an open letter to creditor banks published yesterday by the TBG network. Tourism brands. The network unites approximately 200 dealers distributing various tour operators in 55 cities of Russia. The letter states that of the 15 operators with which the network works, Capital Tour ranks second in terms of sales volumes. Referring partly to open sources, partly to information from the Capital Tour office, the authors of the letter provide the following figures. The company's turnover in 2009 amounted to 16.1 billion rubles, it served more than 1.7 million tourists. The number of people who purchased “Tour Capital” tours for the coming months, incl. for the New Year holidays, is estimated at 20-50 thousand. About 10 thousand clients of Capital Tour are currently in resorts, including very remote ones. The collapse of a company of this magnitude would entail a chain reaction in the market with “catastrophic consequences” for its partners and clients, TBG notes in its letter and asks creditor banks to “be aware of the unprecedented social responsibility of your decision.” It should be noted that already last weekend, individual cases became known when hotels in foreign resorts refused to accommodate arriving Russian tourists, citing the fact that Capital Tour did not pay for their accommodation.
Either MKB really realized its social responsibility, or decided that it would be easier to collect the debt from a “living” travel company, but yesterday it withdrew its claim against Capital Tour and agreed with the company to unfreeze its accounts. However, literally two hours after this good news spread throughout the market, General Director Inna Beltyukova announced the suspension of the company’s activities. She explained the difficult decision for two reasons. For five days, while Capital Tour’s accounts were frozen, and carriers and receiving foreign companies served clients virtually on credit, “the limit of our agreements has been exhausted,” she told the BANKO information service. And the process of unfreezing accounts after a fundamental solution has been found will take several days. The company's disruption, she hopes, will not last more than two days.
Capital Tour President Igor Beltyukov told the same agency that on Wednesday (today) the company would not be able to send approximately 500 tourists abroad.
The Ministry of Sports and Tourism and Rostourism have created a special group to study this situation, Deputy Head of the Ministry Nadezhda Nazina said yesterday. “We sent several requests to the owners of the tour operator Capital Tour with a request to provide information on the number of tourists sent, the real amount of obligations to creditors, and the location of tourists. We have not yet received any answers,” she told RIA Novosti. According to her, this morning an operational meeting was convened at the Ministry of Sports and Tourism, in which the management of Capital Tour was invited to participate.