In the last two weeks Russians who intend to go on vacation abroad faced the sad trend of a daily price hike of the tours. The ruble falls, tour operators declare their prices in dollars or euros, and take the money in rubles. Before the potential tourist reaches the travel agency, their voucher is getting more expensive every day.
This trend was noticed by Alexander Radkov, Head of Federal Tourism Agency. He said that, depending on the extent of the fall of the ruble, demand for holidays abroad may decrease, as prices for tours in the ruble equivalent grow. But due to the rise of the euro and the dollar, demand for domestic resorts and spas may increase.
According to Mr Radkov, last year was marked by growth of all the flows: internal, inbound and outbound.The domestic flow growth makes up about 6% to 8%. I think the incoming number of international arrivals will grow about 10%, outgoing - around 15%. Bookings by foreigners in Russia increased by 25%. More tourists come from the US, China, Canada, France. "Mostly, they booked Moscow, then St. Petersburg, Krasnodar region - 71% growth. mainly thanks to the upcoming Olympics, Moscow region - 56% of bookings among the users of Tripadvisor. Tatarstan - 49%", says Mr Radkov.¶In his opinion, the reason for it is their having implemented a lot of projects under the program for the development of domestic and incoming tourism in 2013. Last year's program included construction of 46 facilities of infrastructure in 22 clusters in 17 subjects of the Russian Federation. Total funding from the federal budget amounted to 2,487 million rubles. This year we have planned to increase the funding. The total funding from the federal budget provided for this year amounts to 4,359 million. I can say that investors are actively engaged in tourism projects. Last year 8.252 billion was drawn from extra-budgetary sources for infrastructure development within the framework of the federal program. Those were private investments".
Mr Radkov says, "To date we have 4642 tourist agencies on the federal register of tour operators. 1909 of them work in external tourism. Last year we had no major scandals involving bankruptcies. However, there were about a dozen bankruptcy cases. We can recall "Orient Express", "North", "Blue Bird" and so on. The association "Turpomosch" has not been involved financially. Not a penny has been spent on the export of tourists. Nevertheless, the association worked. It organized the transfer of 264 people without using the compensation fund. Over the course of 2013 Turpomosch lawyers received nine thousand calls and responded to 17 thousand letters.
The Christmas holidays in general were fairly calm. The only problem was the story of Eviterra, cancellation of tickets for quite a large number of passengers. According to the Federal Air Transport Agency, in the period from December 28 to January 8 Moscow airports served 2083 thousand passengers, exceeding last year's figures by more than 20%. In total, over the New Year's holidays Russian and foreign airlines made 20.5 thousand regular and charter flights. The main destinations were skiing in Europe and tyen Southeast Asia, especially Thailand".
