The leading hotel reservation website Booking.com's wind-down of operations regarding Iran is unlikely to have a significant effect on the country's tourism industry, according to a top official.
The booking platform, whose parent company is based in the US, had added 70 Iranian hotels to its reservation platform and facilitated booking for Iranians who faced difficulty in online international payments after Iran's agreement with world powers on its nuclear program in 2015, known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
It now is restricting its services for Iran in line with the US withdrawal from the deal and its pledge to resume economic sanctions.
The website apologetically told its users in emails that despite strong willingness to continue cooperation, it has stopped its business with Iran due to the new US policy.
The customers were then asked to check their reservations because the website aims to cancel all bookings as of November, ISNA reported.
Jamshid Hamzezadeh, head of Iranian Hoteliers Association, said the cut-off will not affect Iran's inbound travel market.
Never Fully Operational
"Although the inclusion of Iran offered an advantage to hotels, they never managed to interact directly with the customers through the website because the main issue of money transfer was never adequately addressed," he told the news agency.
In fact, reservation of Iranian hotels was performed in a semi-online mode through intermediaries and foreign travelers could not complete their booking on their own.
According to Hamzezadeh, there are no reservation systems at the moment by which tourists can directly deposit money and book a hotel in Iran.
Besides, the amount of booking via the platform was not considerable since most foreign tourists either travel by tours or are on business trips for which hotels are booked through other links.
"The population of independent travelers who used this website was too small to hit the country's tourism on their elimination," the official said. However, the option of reserving foreign hotels in Iran is still available. No notice has yet been released on a ban of hotel bookings for Iranians.
Hamzezadeh said if Booking.com restricts Iranians' access to global reservation or make it difficult, outbound travel will suffer.
"Many Iranian individuals as well as travel agencies used the platform to book hotels worldwide and the embargo on the service will impact foreign travel," he said.
