"Fact" daily writes:
Tourism is one of the most important directions of the Armenian economy, which the authorities have been talking about developing for years, but compared to the words, we have a situation where the full potential of Armenia is not being used. If this continues, Armenia may simply become uncompetitive in the future, because many countries are simply competing with each other in order to attract more tourists to their side. And the most important direction in this field is the provision of services, first of all, accommodation or hotel. And in this branch, Armenia has significant shortcomings. As a result of the polls, it became clear that a significant part of the respondents evaluated the housing services sector of Armenia as average or below average.
It is not that high-quality services are not provided in Armenia, but the problem in this matter is also the lack of appropriate advertising, lack of presence in the international arena and non-targeting. Perhaps with this in mind, the government has defined the standards and procedure for posting information posted by a hotel service provider in online or other platforms in hotel service advertisements or in announcements about providing hotel service, as well as in hotel facilities. Adoption of the decision is definitely positive, as it is aimed at ensuring proper, transparent activity of hotel service providers, equal competitive field, high quality of services and access to information. First of all, it is necessary to properly advertise the tourism sector of Armenia. Create a competitive price-service ratio environment, show Armenia's advantages. From the point of view of emphasizing the uniqueness of the services, one can also take into account the Georgian experience of how they advertise their food, cultural environment and beautiful nature in that context, in the event that we are not inferior to our neighbors in all these respects. Well, except for the sea. Armenia definitely has no shortage of opportunities in terms of cuisine, historical and cultural environment, and beautiful nature. But in Georgia, they pay a lot of attention to the "packaging" of all that. For example, any street can be decorated and presented on various platforms in such a way that it attracts thousands of foreign tourists, with high-quality pictures and videos. Here we give in. In addition, they have created appropriate infrastructures in Georgia, and Armenia still has a lot to do from this point of view. In addition to roads and appropriate means of transport, attention should also be paid to issues that may not seem so important at first glance, such as, for example, the location of toilets. In terms of quality, structural changes are also needed so that tourists feel in a comfortable environment, considering that they are being provided with high-quality services. And it is necessary to create mechanisms to prevent the arbitrary increase of prices. And these steps can be started first of all by solving the problem of rental prices and taxi services. What do we have as a result? And we have the fact that there is a significant decrease in the number of tourists visiting Armenia. According to the data of the tourism committee, in 2024 236,561 tourists visited Armenia in September, while in 2023 in September: 260,618, that is, we had 24,000 less tourists this year. On the other hand, there is a problem of diversifying the sector and carrying out multilateral work. As a rule, the lion's share of tourists visiting Armenia is from Russia. In September of this year, the most tourist visits to Armenia were registered from Russia (43%), Georgia (12%) and Iran (8%). And if a problem suddenly arises with the Russian destination, Armenia's tourism will suffer significantly. And as for the indicators of tourists from Georgia, which came in second place, our compatriots from that country mostly visit, and it is difficult to consider them as tourists...
ARSEN SAHAKYAN
