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Ingosstrakh to compensate tour cost to Lanta's tourists

The Transaero air carrier has promised to lift all of them without any additional charges

MOSCOW, January 29 (Itar-Tass) — The Ingosstrakh insurance company will pay the costs of a foreign trip to the tourists of the Lanta Tour Voyage Company who failed to go on their vacation abroad on January 28 because of Lanta’s unexpected financial hardships. However, the tourists will have to demand compensation for the moral damage from their tourism operator.

“Under the terms of insurance Ingosstrakh compensates exclusively for the tour’s cost. Any moral damage or loss of profit is not covered by insurance in accordance with Russian laws. These losses can be recovered from the tourism operator through standard procedures,” the Ingosstrakh expert Dmitry Melekhin said.

Melekhin told the Vesti FM radio station that tourists whose departures have been delayed and who will be unable to go on their trips in future will have to present a contract with the tourist company and all payment documents, proving that they had paid for the trip to Ingosstrakh if they want to be compensated. Besides, they’ll have to write an application for the payment of insurance indemnity.

Melekhin promised that expenses the tourists had to make abroad would certainly be compensated under the terms of insurance and within the limit of an insurance sum worth 100 million rubles.

Valery Korovkin, the head of the international cooperation department of the Russian Committee for Tourism, said the tourists could start submitting their insurance claims to a special center set up at Lanta’s office.

Lanta Tour Voyage is one of the biggest tourism companies in the Russian market. It sells trips to Thailand, Vietnam and India. The company unexpectedly stopped all its activities late on Friday, January 27, leaving about a hundred of their customers stranded at the airport. They were unable to fly abroad on the night to January 28.

Two thousand seven hundred Lanta Tour tourists are currently staying abroad. The Transaero air carrier has promised to lift all of them without any additional charges. For its part, the Russian Committee for Tourism has asked the Russian Aviation Committee to contact Aeroflot and discuss the possibility of carrying Lanta’s tourists back to Russia without any additional charges.

Lanta Tour Voyage has agreed to inform the Russian Committee for Tourism about what debts it was owing to its partners so as to avoid incidents of extortion of additional payment for hotel accommodation and other services from its tourists.

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