YEREVAN. - Hostels in Armenia have a great perspective of attracting foreign tourists. Lusine Smbatyan, Director of the Armenian Association of Hostel Development, said the aforementioned at a conference on introducing the CerTour Quality Certification System in Agritourism .
According to her, this requires a quality infrastructure system for voluntary certification. The government approved such a system in 2004, but the Association didn’t restrict itself to this, creating its own standard. Of course, most of the present hostels don’t correspond to that standard since many of them are opened in ordinary farmhouses.
“Nevertheless, we think it’s totally possible to achieve a certain quality and we can become more competitive,” she said.
Armenia still has very few registered hostels - only 21 of them. Their turnover is also very low: It constituted only 194.000 AMD (approx. $400) over 10 months in 2015.