Travel Agencies Alliance Unveils Standard Form Tourist-Agent Contract
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The lawyers at Travel Agencies Alliance (TAA) have compiled a standard form contract for selling the tourism product, which from now on will be used by travel agents and their clients.
Andrei Gavrilov, the president of TAA, says that the contract was reviewed by the legal department of Rostourism, whereupon it was deemed fully compliant with the Russian tourism legislation. It is due to be approved by the TAA board at the end of the year, following which it will come into effect and be mandatory for all the alliance members. “We also recommend it to the agencies that are not part of TAA,” said Gavrilov.
The TAA president told TRN that today agencies and tourists deal with different types of contracts when interacting with each other. Wide-spread examples would be contracts of sale and commission contracts. They comply with the Russian Civil Code, but in the law ‘The fundamental principles of tourist activities in Russia’ there is a provision for the contract of tourism product sale, and it is this document that the standard form contract has been devised for.
According to Gavrilov, the TAA lawyers have removed all the incidental items from the previous versions of the contracts and made the wording more transparent. As a result, the revised document is now as easy to understand for tourists as possible.
In accordance with the new contract, tour operators are fully responsible for providing all the services that are included in a tourism product. The information about operators is given in the appendix №2. Moreover, upon the customer’s request the travel agency must provide information on the material conditions of the contract that it signed with the operator.
In the event of customers not following through on their contractual payment obligations, travel agents have the right to cancel the tour booking while still charging customers for the actual expenses incurred.
As for customers, they reserve the right to cancel the contact, providing they compensate the travel agent for all the actual expenses incurred when executing the contract.
Valeria Romanenkova, the operator managing director at agent network ‘Hot Tours’, told the TRN correspondent that the new contract form beyond any doubt fully complies with the tourism legislation, since it was meticulously compiled by the alliance’s lawyers and was approved in Rostourism. “Our agents have already been using this contract form, but the new revision is more fine-tuned and polished,” she said.
According to Gavrilov, as of today TAA comprises eight agent networks: ‘Magazin Goryashih Putyovok’ (‘Last minute offers’), ‘Hot Tours’, ‘Global-Travel’, ‘Sputnik’, ‘1001 tour’, ‘TBG. Travel Brands’, ‘Vista’ and ‘Travel Business Service’. So far there have been no membership requests from independent travel agents.
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