The Federal Tourism Agency can now forcibly exclude tour operators from the register, but this will not yet affect the problematic Natalie Tours

Today, September 3, amendments to the law “On the Fundamentals of Tourism Activities” came into force, which will allow Rostourism to forcibly exclude companies that do not fulfill their obligations from the register of tour operators. The State Duma adopted the corresponding bill on May 22. Previously, the company itself had to file an application to terminate its activities, or this decision was made by the court.

After exclusion from the list of tour operators, the company is released from financial support of its responsibility and payment of fees until April 1 of the following year, Kommersant clarifies.

However, the tour operator Natalie Tours, which on July 4 canceled all clients’ tours until September 30 and owed them a large amount of compensation, will remain an operating company for now, a person who knows about this from the management of the Federal Agency for Tourism (Rosturizm) told Vedomosti .

The founder of the legal agency "Persona Grata" Georgy Mokhov draws attention to the fact that the law has a rather complex wording: it is possible to terminate the activities of a tour operator only due to the "impossibility of fulfilling all obligations to tourists and customers under contracts for the sale of a tourism product." The key here is “all”: it is difficult to prove that a company cannot fulfill all of its obligations. In addition, if Rostourism revokes the license of Natalie Tours, the tour operator may challenge this decision in court, Mokhov believes.

In addition, Natalie Tours collected applications for payments from tourists from June 30 to July 4, and since then the company has 90 days to fulfill its obligations, and this period will expire only in a month, another source told the newspaper. In addition, the company has already paid 3.5 million rubles. to its tourists and allegedly continues to pay off debts to clients.

On July 4, Natalie Tours announced the cancellation of all confirmed tours until September 30. According to experts, by the end of the year she had sold about 30 thousand tours for a total amount of at least 1.2 billion rubles. At the same time, the head of the tour operator, Vladimir Vorobyov, said that he would continue to operate and offered tourists, instead of trips, guarantees that they would be able to go on a tour of the appropriate cost in the summer of 2019. Some clients agreed to this proposal, but many began to go to court.