Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak held a meeting on labor productivity in tourism at the Mamison resort.
At the meeting, attended by North Ossetia Head Sergey Menyailo, Deputy Plenipotentiary Representative in the district Vladimir Nadykto, Deputy Ministers of Economic Development Sergey Nazarov and Dmitry Vakhrukov, as well as the leadership of Kavkaz.RF, a pilot program to increase labor productivity in tourism was presented. It was developed at the end of December last year.
The president has set an ambitious goal of increasing the growth rate of labor productivity in the country. In the context of a labor shortage, this is a key factor in improving efficiency and redistributing the workforce to high-productivity sectors. Tourism has significant potential for such a leap forward, the deputy prime minister emphasized.
The implementation of this program will be handled by the industry competence center (ICC) in the field of tourism, created on the basis of Kavkaz.RF. The first successful projects are already in place — hoteliers themselves told Alexander Novak about them.
As a result of working with the ICC, the time required to completely clean a room at the five-star Mayri Park Hotel in Arkhyz was reduced by 24 minutes, rooms were ready for check-in an hour earlier, and guest complaints about room cleanliness/amenities ceased.
Employee engagement has increased significantly. People realized that they were not working more, but simply doing the same work as before more easily and quickly. The system for submitting suggestions for improvements allows employees to see that their ideas are visible, taken into account, and not lost somewhere in a paper trail. Optimization has allowed us to consider that with the further implementation of the proposed tools, the work of preparing a cottage for occupancy without loss of quality and time can be done by two employees instead of three, as is currently the case. This will allow us to clean more cottages at the same time, which is very important during peak periods, says Elena Kotova, general manager of the hotel.
One of the mechanisms for increasing labor productivity is “boxed solutions” — well-developed algorithms for changing the most routine and important hotel processes. These include: laundry turnover, room preparation and setup, guest reservations and accommodation, and buffet organization.
Another mechanism is targeted support for those lagging behind. Here, experts will focus primarily on health resorts and amusement parks, where, according to research, labor productivity is lowest and there is a lack of ready-made solutions due to the specific nature of each facility. Interestingly, the productivity of travel agencies and tour operators, on the contrary, exceeds the industry average, so this target group receives less attention in the program.
The personnel issue is also relevant for the Mamison resort, which opened last year and was built by Kavkaz.RF. The cluster became the first major state infrastructure project in the mountains after the introduction of European sanctions on cable car manufacturers. Currently, Mamison has two cable cars and 10 km of trails. The tourist flow in 2025 was 40,000 people, and in January of this year, it was 10,000 tourists.
Our experience gained at other resorts built by the company helps us resolve all the “teething problems” of the new facility. For example, the rescue and avalanche rescue services were trained by the nationally renowned Elbrus team, and the OCK is implementing the expertise gained at large resorts with a tourist flow of 7, 000-10 ,000 guests per day. We pay great attention to continuity and feedback from guests. This is a continuous process of improvement, where we cannot stop for a single day,
notes Andrey Yumshanov, CEO of Kavkaz.RF.
The implementation of the entire set of measures provided for in the program will increase labor productivity by 23% by 2030 compared to 2024. In real terms, this will increase the added value in four “tourist” areas by 179.4 billion rubles.
