Turkish Culture Minister Mahir Unal posted an address on Twitter to potential Russian tourists in Russian, English and Turkish. He said that Turkey remained “an absolutely safe country.” Turkey has been a leading destination for Russian tourists over the past 13 years. In recent years, about 3 million Russian citizens visited it annually. The popularity of Turkey grew year by year. However, next summer the country will lack Russian tourists, as Russia has prohibited selling tours to Turkey by Russian tour operators and charter flights there, due to the incident with the Russian military aircraft.
Maya Lomidze, Executive Director of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia, says that Turkey is not a popular destination for the winter season. "There were no special charter flights in this direction, no special efforts on the part of tour operators were required. But this year is a kind of exception, because you know that, on November 6th, flights to Egypt were banned, and part of the tourist flow, we estimate approximately 3-5% of the tourist flow who had paid tours to Egypt, were refocused on Turkey. At the time of the MFA advice for not to travelling to Turkey, respectively, the recommendations of the Federal Tourism Agency to stop selling tours to Turkey, there were about 11 thousand of our citizens. Since then, some of them have returned. According to our estimates, now there are about 9000 Russian tourists in Turkey. But at the moment an emergency return of these citizens has not been considered."
“About 6000 travel packages have been pre-sold. The majority of them, about two-thirds, more than 4000, are directly for the New Year holidays. That is, for the period between December 28-29th and January 9-10th. Accordingly, the question arises of what to do with these tours. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have the experience of Egypt, so they have the same choice as those tourists who had paid for tours to Egypt. They can reuse the ticket, can rebook for a different destination by offsetting the amount that was spent, as well as certain operators, I stress, some, not all, offer to freeze the funds for the return of Turkey to the tourist market,” Lomidze says.
The reasons for the closure of Turkey and Egypt are quite different, but in both cases we are talking about the safety of our citizens, but in the case of Turkey, the prognosis for the return of Turkey to the tourist market is murky. “If in the case of Egypt we can talk about some notional end date, that after all the necessary safety equipment in the airports will be installed, our tourists will return to Egypt. The outlook with Turkey is not clear, so it is clear that the vast majority of tourists will try to rebook their existing packages to other destinations. It seems premature now to make any predictions about the 2016 summer season,” Lomidze stated.
