The State Committee for Tourism Development intends to increase the competitiveness of domestic travel companies and hospitality entities in the international tourism services market by providing incentives for the introduction of cutting-edge technologies for electronic sales of tours and hotel rooms.
Aziz Abduhakimov, Chairman of the State Committee for Tourism, noted that to date, domestic tourism agencies and hotels are losing their foreign competitors bad because of the lack of online booking, acquiring, e-payment of hospitality services purchased by foreign tourists or a tour to Uzbekistan. In this situation, travelers, especially individual ones, prefer to purchase tourist products to Uzbekistan from foreign travel companies that have relevant services on their websites.
This problem also concerns domestic tourists: until recently there was not a single travel company on the website of which a resident of our republic could buy a tour online, for example, in Samarkand, with payment through a bank card. Only recently, as a pilot project, a website with a similar service was launched by Asiatour (www.turshop.uz). The Committee will continue to actively support similar initiatives of the participants of the tourism market.
The State Committee for the Development of Tourism proposes to address this problem by providing tax incentives in the form of exclusion of expenses for the implementation of IT- technologies from the taxable base to the entities of tourism activities who introduce online services of booking, acquiring, electronic payment for purchased services and other online services, as well as running their own multilingual website.
(Source: «Uzbekistan Today» newspaper)
