YEREVAN. – Armenian News - NEWS.am is starting a series of interviews with companies who do business over the web. Our goal is to highlight the loss of economic opportunity because of the long-standing failure of the state to fully enable the operation of PayPal. Today, we’ve talked to the general manager of Armhotels.am online booking system, Mr. Ashot Nazaryan.

Mr. Nazaryan, Armhotels online booking system was launched 5 years ago. Back then you told that you had included almost every hotel in Armenia, and that you expected interest from both local and inbound tourists. To what extent has this come true?

Of course, our ambitions were not very high. The project was new, the market had not yet absorbed online booking and did not trust it completely. But these five years have been, in our view, satisfactory. They have been fully in line with what we had expected.

These past years saw deterioration of Russia-Turkey relations, and some of the most popular tourist destinations were blighted by terrorism. Has this affected your work?

Not too much, because the events you refer to took place in Turkey and Egypt, which are known for their seaside. Since Armenia does not have any, we cannot really attract tourists who fancied sea beaches. On the other hand, things are starting to move in the Iranian market after sanctions against that country were lifted. We can see this clearly through our stats of 2016 compared to the 2015.

People around the globe use Internet payment systems as a daily practice. Tourists are no exception. Are you satisfied with access of Armenians to Internet payment tools?

Payment systems operating in Armenia service local ArCa cards, as well as Master and Visa cards. Our systems are little known outside Armenia, and foreign users are a bit wary with them, hesitating to fill in their card data. We are in a little bit better position, because Armhotels, on top of local payment systems, uses Skrill (Moneybookers) international systems, which is compatible to almost every type of plastic cards internationally.

PayPal isn’t yet fully accessible in Armenia, while globally it has 179 million active users who in 2015 performed 282 million transactions. How much has it cost you, or Armenian tourism in general, to have missed this market over these years?

Lots of our clients advise us to work with PayPal. We don’t have an exact calculation, but we can assume what it could look like if we compare figures of the visitors and bookers at our site. The fact that we cannot reach 179 million people you’ve mentioned is clearly a serious loss by itself.

Georgian officials, unlike their Armenian peers, did make an effort to install PayPal, and now it’s available in Georgian banks. Have you considered opening an account with PayPal in Georgia to not let your clients go?

This is a meaningful thing to do to stay in touch with the market, but I wouldn’t call this a comprehensive solution As far as I know, regulatory framework for e-commerce in Armenia has not been fully developed yet, and these gaps need filling in. As soon as they are, and as soon as PayPal and other systems see that legislation is there, that clients and they are protected from possible fraud, than we could consider the problem resolved.