Nothing is forgotten – Newspaper Kommersant No. 50 (7495) dated 03/24/2023

Now the tourist trips of Russians to Europe, due to limited air traffic and bank cards that do not work abroad, have begun to resemble pre-pandemic voyages to exotic countries. Operators have always been reluctant to sell such tours.

However, the Association of Tour Operators of Russia drew attention to the presence of such programs for the summer at least eight major travel companies. We are talking about trips to Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Netherlands, Cyprus and other countries. Some players are already seeing an increase in demand.

The return of tour operators to this market is a completely logical trend. On the one hand, the number of trips of Russians to European countries over the past year, according to the FSB border service, decreased not only by 84% by the pre-pandemic 2019, but also by 17% by 2021, to 2.6 million people. But on the other hand, organizing European trips on your own is now difficult: travelers need not only to think through the more complicated logistics, but also to resolve issues with paying for services abroad.

These barriers contribute to the promotion of the services of tour operators and agents in European destinations. Booking through them is for many a way to pay for hotels and tickets directly, in rubles. And for tour operators, such clients have become quite desirable during the crisis.

To the many complexities of a European vacation, the increased number of operations required when booking trips was added: now, when sending a client, a travel company converts rubles into currency, books a hotel and air tickets for several separate flight segments at once. All this leads to an increase in the number of commissions. The size of the latter is not limited in any way, but my interlocutor on the tourist market believes that the average profitability when booking a trip to the EU countries is now 12%.

Compared with the average for the tour operator market of 2-3%, it turns out not so bad. Here it is worth remembering the increased cost of such trips in itself. While the average check for buying a tour to Turkey this spring was about 90 thousand rubles, a trip to Europe was hardly cheaper than 300 thousand rubles.

But the tour operators themselves do not seem to be ready for a full-scale return of tours to Europe yet: most market participants on their official websites offer only hotels and other ground services. Tourists, as a rule, purchase air travel separately.

There is a political risk. After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, market participants did not receive an official recommendation from the authorities not to sell tours to “unfriendly” countries. But many are guided by the aphorism “better safe than sorry”, trying to distance themselves from any hypothetical risks of European travel.