Director of the tourism department at Iran's Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization, Mohammad Moheb-Khodaei, said Saturday that his office has been mandated as the sole body responsible for licensing the travel agencies as per a government directive.
Travel agencies and tour operators are classified into three groups based on their license type, according to IRNA.
One group are ticket service providers for air travel that obtain their work permit from the Iran Civil Aviation Organization and the other group involves the so-called "pilgrimage agencies" that, as the name suggests, organize domestic and international religious tours under license from the Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization.
ICHHTO's tourism department has so far been only in charge of licensing one of the three, which offer a range of services in the touring industry, including hotel booking and visa application (to none-religious destinations).
Moheb-Khodaei underscored the binding nature of the new tourism law, saying, "The tourism organization is now responsible for issuing the three types of permits for travel agencies and no other organization should resist complying with the government's decision."
The new amendments will take effect in "one or two months," he stressed. ICHHTO has been targeting to create a single window for administrative procedures of tourism-related operations and projects so that investors and business owners would not have to go from one organization to the other.
