St Petersburg Hotel Forum should become an annual venue of professional interaction

Thursday saw the 3rd St Petersburg Hotel Forum held within the framework of the jubilee Travel Trade Fair INWETEX – CIS TRAVEL MARKET. It was organised by the Northwest Regional Department of the Russian Union of Holiday Industry and CJSC Saint-Petersburg Express. The hoteliers of St Petersburg and the Northwest, as well as the representatives of the travel industry from other regions of Russia working at the exhibition under the Professional Visitor Project came together to discuss the pressing problems of the hospitality industry and vector the 2013 discussion. The result of the meeting was not unexpected for the participants: making strategic decisions, the federal and regional authorities seldom take the opinion of business cycles into account. To make its opinion heard, the hotel business of the region should oftener come forward with initiatives and be more persistent and better organised.

Opening the Forum, Director of the Northwest Regional Department of the Russian Union of Travel Industry Tatyana Gavrilova noticed that she would like to treat it not as a single, though representative event, but as a forum in a blogger sense of the word, i.e. a regularly functioning venue for dialogue, establishment of initiative groups and coordination of activities.
The discussion began with the good news of the industry. The leading expert of ANO Test-Northwest Lilia Bitkulova reminded the audience that July 1, 2012 saw attachment of the State Accommodation Facility Classification Standard officially regulating assignment of stars to hotels. In St Petersburg, the new-system 3 stars have already been awarded to a small hotel, the Russian Union of Travel Industry member, Cronwell Inn Stremyannaya and the Baltia Hotel. The expert expressed an opinion of a necessity to audit the hospitality bed availability in the region and, in the long run, in the whole country and appealed to the hotels not to be into unjustified positioning by category. «Being advertised as a hotel of a certain number of stars is very different from being a hotel of this number of stars in fact», emphasised Lilia Bitkulova.

Nearly all the problems worrying the hoteliers of the Northwest should be resolved at the federal level, which complicates interaction of business and power, noted Director General of UK Cronwell Management, Aleksey Musakin. However, even the Administration of St Petersburg is rather reluctant to take the opinion of the professional community into account when developing the most important prospective documents. Hoteliers did not have any chance to read the St Petersburg Hotel System Development Programme up to its publication.
Mr Musakin noted that the only way for the hoteliers to make their opinion known is to establish an active work group, probably, on the basis of the Russian Union of Travel Industry, which would consistently work on solution of the hotel-industry problems together with the tourism authorities.

Speaking of the recent tendencies in development of the hotel business, the hotelier underscored activization of foreign hotel brands in the segment of budgetary hotels, appearance of western-type hospitality schools in St Petersburg and the boom in the countryside property market. «The municipalities of Leningrad oblast/province are ready to support reconstruction of many manours and use them for tourism and leisure", Tatyana Gavrilova agreed with the expert. "Luga rayon/sector has already prepared the documents necessary for restoration of four properties with budgetary funds».
The leading speaker of the after-dinner part of the Forum was the hotelier and business consultant General Manager of Domina Prestige Hotel St Petersburg Blake Anderson-Buntz, well-known in St Petersburg. In his fascinating performance, he made a comprehensive comparison of the Russian and the western hotel management systems. According to the professional of the industry, the first is characterised by careful development of internal procedures (accounts, personnel management), whereas the second focuses on marketing, promotion, public relations and statistics. «The Russian accounting system has a lot of good features; however, it provides 50 times as less analytical material as the western-type accounts do. And work with such data helps the hotelier to understand his own business much better», he said.

In his conversation with forum participants, Blake Anderson-Bunts also spoke about the advantages and disadvantages of various electronic systems of booking and hotel accounts and evaluated the prospects of the Russian regional hotel market. «Do you want an honest answer how I do my business? Neither in a Russian nor in a western way. It is necessary to combine the best achievements of these approaches. I like concentrating, analysing and making the system work», the expert shared his experience with the audience.

The Forum was finished by the regional manager of Ecolab Roman Voronezhev, who talked about the new approaches in ecological management of hotels.

Russian Union of Travel Industry, Northwest Regional Department, Press Service

http://travelexhibition.ru/en/press-centre/news/news_16.html