23.05.07

Registration: Headaches Not Over For Tourists
By Josh Wilson and Tatyana Chebotareva
Market Analysts, Alinga Consulting Group

Russia’s new registration procedure, which was touted by officials as being a vast improvement over the previous system, is still causing a multitude of problems for tourists and tourism in Russia alike.

Some of the main problems were pointed out at a tourism industry conference recently held in St. Petersburg. The problem at hand largely revolves around the law "On Migration Registration of Foreign Citizens and Stateless Persons in the Russian Federation,” which went into effect on January 15, 2007. Although the law has been effective for several months, it also took several months for the various departments within the Russian government to finalize the forms and various procedures that are needed to implement the law. Thus, many problems have not been discovered until very recently.

Previously, a tourist staying in a Petersburg hotel presented, along with his visa, his migration card (received and filled out on the plane), on which the hotel stamped a registration for the period of his stay. Without registration, tourists are considered to be in Russia illegally and can face fines of several hundred dollars, deportation, and even arrest – even if they have a valid visa.

Under the old system, after stamping the migration card, hotel employees informed the Federal Migration Service about the guests using a computer program known as "Guest," or presented the information in bulk once a month. Either option took little time and effort by the hotel.

The new system requires that each guest’s information be entered within 24 hours at an authorized regional office of the Federal Migration Service. Hotel staff, then, must make daily trips to this office daily to personally present information about the stay of each foreign tourist and receive in return a special slip of paper with the corresponding stamp. This paper, along with a visa and passport, must be shown to a member of the Russia militsiya (police) at any time if requested. Upon leaving Russia, the tourist must surrender this piece of paper to the hotel and the hotel, before noon the following day, must give the paper back to the Migration Service to have the tourist removed from the register by the noon the following day. If the tourist loses this paper, or if hotel staff fail to present all information within the strictly defined time period, the hotel and its management are subject to fines amounting to some 2,000 USD and administrative sanctions.

To make matters worse, the receiving hours for most of the regional offices where registration must occur are limited to 2 - 4 p.m, and usually only four days per week. This makes it logistically impossible for hotels to fully comply with the law. While the government and the law’s authors have admitted that this is a problem, no solution has yet to be found. The situation is set to only worsen as the number of tourists escalates over the summer because each office currently employs only one person to process all the registrations for each region, which can contain dozens of hotels. The migration service has offered no comment on this issue. 

For tourists, there are other complications. Hotels have not been authorized to issue any sort of interim documentation for the several hours needed to process a guest’s registration. Without documentation, the individual would need to stay on the hotel property to avoid facing fines if stopped on the street. This, according to the Association of Tour Guides, Interpreters and Tourism Managers, a Moscow-based organization, is a major problem. The association recently sent a letter to the Moscow Central Police Department asking the chief of police to clamp down on police soliciting bribes from tourists. Of particular concern to the association was the apparently common practice of stopping tourists on Red Square. Typically, after checking into a local hotel, tourists will head straight for Russia’s number one tourist attraction: the Kremlin. The officers patrolling Red Square, apparently aware of this, frequently stop tourists there and, threatening massive fines and deportation, easily extract bribes from the newly arrived.

There could also be problems upon leaving Russia. The new registration system uses a computer system that is connected with passport control at Russian airports. If a tourist arrives on a Friday and leaves Sunday morning, for instance, it is very possible that his/her information will not have been entered into the system due to the restricted working hours of the regional offices.

Hotels, for their part, are often frightened of what might happen if the new registration paper were to get lost and thus do not give the paper to the guest. A copy, which seems to be sufficient, is often given, but not always. Travelers to Russia should be forewarned that they should at least request this copy.

Representatives of the hotel industry in St. Petersburg have sent a request to the main offices of the Federal Migration Service for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad oblast and to the city administration asking for clarification or revision of the new law. Their letter states, in part: "The introduction of federal law No. 109, from our point of view, could substantially impede the rate of development of Petersburg as a tourist center. Since April 2006, most of the hotels in the city have been linked to the information system of migration registration with the help of the program "Guest" and information about a foreign tourist is available to the migration service in real-time. In our opinion, the use of electronic document exchange with this program, and considering the legislation on recognizing electronic signatures, can help resolve the above problem with migration registration."

The authorities have agreed that a problem exists, and say that all police and passport control personnel are aware of the problems and have been told to treat document checks accordingly.

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