Soviets Check In With the Inn Crowd : Tourism: As Western practices invade the U.S.S.R., Russian hoteliers pick up personnel and management tips here.

By CRISTINA LEE

Oct. 31, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ORANGE — When Sergei Koba checked into Hilton Suites Hotel here this week, he was surprised that he never saw the maid.

“There’s an invisible hand serving me in my room. Everything is always ready for me, but I never see the cleaning lady,” Koba remarked. “But I feel her presence at the press of a button.”

Koba, executive manager responsible for personnel at the Yalta Hotel in the Soviet Ukraine, is leading one of the first delegations of Soviet hoteliers to visit the United States.

His 24-member group, composed of tour bus drivers, banquet managers and hotel managers from the Yalta and Leningrad hotels, are conferring with their U.S. counterparts on how Soviet hotels can improve their services.

The Soviets met with hotel personnel at the Orange hotel Monday and Tuesday and will travel on to Santa Barbara and Las Vegas later this week. The visit was arranged by East-West International Tours Inc., a Placentia-based tour operator.

This trip is particularly important to the Yalta, a 1,300-room hotel on the Black Sea, a popular place for Soviets, especially in winter, Koba said. The Yalta is in the midst of building an all-suite wing, which will make it the first Soviet hotel to have such a facility.

Until last year, Soviet hotels had to have the approval of Intourist, the Soviet government travel agency, to accommodate foreign tourists, according to Olga Abramova, the tour operator at the Leningrad, an 800-room hotel in the city of the same name.

A new law passed in 1989 allowed local hotels to contract out 10% of hotel rooms for foreign tour groups, while 90% remain under the control of Intourist, which allocates to foreigners and local citizens about 60,000 hotel rooms throughout the Soviet Union.

Soviet hotels, which are owned by Intourist, can keep the hard currencies and profits made from the allocated rooms, Abramova said. In the cases of the Leningrad and Yalta, they used the profits to refurbish their facilities and upgrade services, she said.

“This is very important because hotels can now begin real marketing in the Western sense and to develop their personnel,” Abramova said. “As hotels become more independent and have access to more hard currency, they can create their own tour programs. They can buy nicer buses and more things for the guests and other things that hotels need.”

While conceding that the service and comfort of U.S. hotels are superior to most of those in the Soviet Union, Ivan A. Karagezov, the Yalta’s sales and marketing manager, said this will change as Soviet hotels acquire more hard currency in the future.

“This is an educational process for us,” he remarked. “I think this hotel tour experience has opened my eyes to the power of your economy.”

The new openness in the Soviet tourist industry has led to a venture between the Yalta and Leningrad hotels and East-West. The venture, started last December, allowed East-West and the hotels to arrange for specialty tours that brought U.S. tourists to the homes of Soviet families and intellectuals, and meet with teachers and students in gymnastic and ballet training schools.

“We don’t just bring the tourists to museums and parks. I give them lessons in Russian history during the tour,” said East-West President Robert Feldman, who also happens to be a professor of Russian history and director of the Russian Studies Program at Cal State Fullerton. “We accommodate the desires of each group so much so that none of the five tours we brought to the Soviet Union has been duplicated.”

Koba and his delegation leaves for Santa Barbara today and will be visiting hotels in Las Vegas later this week, after which they will return to the Soviet Union.