Quote:
Originally Posted by crockett
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I thought you are the only idiot here, but looks like the NBC guys are not smarter either... There is no a single sanction against Russian travel agencies. If you look at the list you will discover that all of them apply to banks, large companies like Gasprom and to some Russian politicians
personally. That's all.
As about the bankruptcy. There is a lot of ones that were bankrupt long before and they just waited for a good moment. The problem is that most of these companies are anachronism in the Internet era. People don't want to pay to mediators anymore because they can book hotels and flights directly.
Most of these agencies were able to live only because of police/FSB officers. For a note: these have a right to fly anywhere for free (in fact the government pays for them) once per year. So they never bothered to find a cheaper flight (why should they if it's free anyways?) Thus they always were the most important clients for the travel agencies. However the situation has changed after the Ukrainian crisis. Now police/FSB officers are allowed to travel to a limited list of countries only (in fact they can't leave Russia at all). This is not because of sanctions. This is their internal regulation to avoid possible problems outside of Russia. This regulation has lowered the number of tourists that use travel agency services up to 30%. Course that was used as a bankruptcy justification by many cheap and rogue travel agencies. On the other hand, the big and trusted ones like
Tez Tour are working in a regular way.
You look like a clown here because you are trying to discuss on things you have no idea about. So once again:
there are no sanctions towards Russian travel agencies.
P.S. One more thing. A few rogue travel agencies gone bankrupt in Russia (some simple "disappear")
every single year. Thus every traveler is risking a lot using the cheap and small companies to buy a tour. It's like playing a Russian roulette. As I said above, there are big and trusted companies, but their prices are much higher. Here is a non-complete list of travel agencies that gone bankrupt in 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 (yes before the Ukrainian crisis and "sanctions"):
http://ria.ru/spravka/20140716/1016209094.html