Experts evaluate the restoration of air traffic from the Russian Federation to Europe

Eurostat sees air passenger traffic in the EU doubling in 2022 to 820 million, and IATA expects another 20% growth this year. The contribution of Russians to these indicators is difficult to assess, since they mainly fly to Europe through third countries. Experts talk about an increase in travel to the EU by 15–30%, but the range of quantitative estimates ranges from 2 million to 4–5 million people. This is significantly less than the level of 2019, when 10 million Russians visited Europe. The most popular destinations remain France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. In the future, the popularity of European routes will depend on the availability of visas, experts note: so far the percentage of refusals in Schengen does not exceed 10%.

Passenger transport in the EU more than doubled in 2022, from 374 million to 820 million, Eurostat said. Data for this year is not yet available, but IATA predicts that traffic in the European region will grow by almost 20% in 2023.

Expert opinions on the contribution of traffic from the Russian Federation to EU countries are divided primarily due to the difficulties of calculation. According to the FSB Border Service, in the three quarters of 2023, Russians made a total of 1.37 million trips to EU countries, which is 30.8% less than a year earlier.

In total, 2.4 million Russians crossed the border with the EU in 2022.

But these statistics do not take into account passengers on transit flights and include private trips for non-tourist purposes. Executive Director of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia Maya Lomidze previously assumed that up to 1 million tourists from Russia could travel to EU countries this year. Interest in such travel is growing, but the flow is extremely far from the level of 2019, when we were talking about more than 10 million people, she explained.

Vice-President of the Russian Union of Travel Industry Dmitry Gorin believes that the number of tourist trips to the EU this year has increased by 15-30% compared to last year’s low base, the gap with the level of 2019 is about 80%. Most often, Russians traveled to France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Austria, Hungary and Cyprus. The expert associates the growth with the stabilization of the situation with the issuance of visas, the adaptation of tourists to payments abroad, and the entry of foreign carriers into the Russian market. Flights to Europe are carried out mainly with connections through the countries of the post-Soviet space, the Middle East and Turkey.

According to the most optimistic estimates of Kommersant’s sources in the industry, taking into account the surge in flights to the EU through Yerevan, Istanbul and Tbilisi, real traffic is approaching 4–5 million trips from Russia to the EU.

This is indirectly confirmed by data from the BSP settlement system: according to statistics from foreign distribution systems, the volume of traffic of foreign airlines also reached 4.5 million segments, including those used on connecting flights from the Russian Federation through Amadeus, Saber and Galileo.

Only Italy was included among the most popular foreign destinations on Ostrovok.ru from EU countries this year. The average cost of a night increased by 35%, to 12.8 thousand rubles. Yandex Travels noted an increase in demand for hotels in Italy and France by three to five times compared to last year’s low base. In OneTwoTrip, the top 10 foreign destinations by the number of tickets issued per year included Paris (1.8% of the total number of orders, the cost of a one-way flight is 16 thousand rubles) and Rome (1.3%, 13 thousand rubles .).

According to Yandex Travel calculations, EU countries accounted for 7.8% of round-trip air tickets booked to non-CIS countries this year: this is 2.7 percentage points less than a year earlier.

In the structure of one-way ticket sales, the value for the year decreased by 0.3 percentage points, to 8.8%. Yandex Travel clarifies that in physical terms the number of trips to the EU increased by several thousand, and the share was diluted due to more pronounced growth in other directions. The average bill for the year increased by 45%, to 76.4 thousand rubles. for a round trip ticket. The average cost of a night in a hotel decreased by 45%, to 7.7 thousand rubles, which was probably caused by a redistribution of demand in favor of more budget options.

At the end of 2022, according to statistics from the SchengenVisaInfo portal, Russians applied for Schengen visas 687 thousand times and were refused in 10% of cases. The countries that issued visas most often were Spain, Italy and Finland. The latter, according to Kommersant’s interlocutors, left the top in 2023 and was replaced by France, Greece, and Hungary. The share of Cyprus and Bulgaria issuing national visas remains consistently high. There is no official data on the total number of visas yet, but “there have been no significant reductions in the volume of Schengen issuance,” according to experts. Only 17 of the 27 Schengen countries continue to issue visas to Russians, notes Dmitry Gorin. According to forecasts from Kommersant sources in the expert community, if EU countries continue to issue visas to Russians at the same pace as in 2023, passenger traffic to Europe in 2024 will increase by 20–30%.

Aigul Abdullina, Alexandra Mertsalova