TEHRAN, May 28 (Xinhua) -- Booking.com's recent restrictions on Iran are unlikely to have a significant impact on inbound tourism market, Iranian Hoteliers' chief said Monday.
"The Iranian hotels never managed to interact directly with the (foreign) customers through the website because the main issue of money transfer was never adequately solved," Jamshid Hamzezadeh was quoted by the Financial Tribune daily as saying.
In fact, reservation of Iranian hotels is performed in a semi-online mode through intermediaries, and foreign travelers could not complete their booking on their own, Hamzezadeh said.
There are no reservation systems at the moment by which tourists can directly deposit money and book a hotel in Iran, he noted.
The number of hotel bookings via the platform was not very big since most foreign tourists either travel to Iran in tour groups or are on business trips for which hotels are booked through other links, he added.
"The population of independent travelers who used this website is too small to hit the country's tourism on their elimination," Hamzezadeh said.
If Booking.com restricts Iranians' access to global reservation or make it difficult, outbound travel will also suffer, he said.
"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.
Booking.com, based in the United States, recently restricted its services for Iran in line with the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and its pledge to resume economic sanctions.
