Putin to ramp up surveillance of Russians’ travels abroad
The Russian government is preparing to take steps to increase the monitoring of Russian citizens’ tourist travels abroad.
In order to do this, they plan to increase usage of the Electronic Pass system, which will collect data on tours purchased by citizens through tourist companies.
The system, which has been under development since 2015 as part of the law “On the fundamentals of tourist activity”, was initially intended to be voluntary.
Now, however, the Federal Agency for Tourism (Rosturizm) and Rostec have proposed to make the system mandatory for all tour operators, and to legislatively formalize the transmission of information.
The future of Electronic Pass was discussed in May with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who gave a resolution that he “consents” to the proposal by Rostec and Rosturizm, explained Alexander Osaulenko, director of TurPomoshch. The business has been warned that Electronic Pass will soon become mandatory, he added.
JSC National Tourist Technology, an entity controlled by the state corporation Rostec, will be the operator of Electronic Pass. Putin gave the relevant instruction after this was requested by Rostec and Rosturizm.
The government is currently working to organize the implementation of this order, a source in Rosturizm noted.
Initially, the voluntary form of Electronic Pass was supposed to be operational by January 1, 2018. However, the project has still not been brought live, despite 500 million rubles already being spent on it.
JSC Asteros, the company developing the system, filed for bankruptcy in March.
At the start of June, the Association of Tour Operators (ATOR) reported that Electronic Pass was no longer accessible to market participants: the section on Rosturizm’s website from which the system could be accessed disappeared. This coincided with the end of the guaranteed period during which Asteros was obligated to support and refine the system.
According to sources within ATOR, the company has almost no staff who are capable of supporting the system, and the location of the servers on which it was hosted is unknown.