The Chairman of the State Committee for Tourism Aziz Abdukhakimov noted that “currently, domestic tourism operators and hotels are badly losing their foreign competitors as a result of the lack of online booking, acquiring, e-payment of hotel services purchased by foreign tourists or a tour to Uzbekistan. In this situation, tourists, especially individual tourists, prefer to purchase tourist services in Uzbekistan from foreign travel companies that have relevant services on their websites.”

“This problem also applies to domestic tourists - until recently there was not a single travel company on the website of which a resident of our republic could buy an online tour, for example, to 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,” Abdukhakimov added.

The State Committee for Development of Tourism of the Republic of Uzbekistan proposes to solve this problem by providing tourism entities with online services of booking, acquiring, e-payment for purchased services and other online services, as well as their own multilingual website, tax exemptions in the form of exclusion of expenses for IT implementation technologies from the taxable base.