The turnover of the business tourism market this year may exceed 650 billion rubles

The total turnover of the business tourism market in 2023 will amount to 650 billion rubles, Dmitry Gorin, chairman of the board of the Union of Business Travel Agencies, calculated for Vedomosti. This indicator, according to him, corresponds to the level of 2019, which means that this segment will fully recover after the coronavirus pandemic.

For comparison, in 2020, the market turnover, according to Gorin’s calculations, was 325 billion rubles, and in 2021 – about 455-487 billion rubles. The segment failed to recover last year due to a reduction in the number of flights, the departure of a number of airlines and a ban on flights over part of the territory of Russia and other countries. This indicator was at the level of 422.5 billion rubles.

The fact that the business travel market in Russia can reach the level of pre-pandemic 2019 is also believed by other interviewed experts. In particular, representatives of Aeroclub, Vipservice, OneTwoTrip and Bronevik.com speak about this. But they did not provide absolute numbers.

In the second half of last year, new transport logistics corridors were formed in the country, Gorin explains the reason for the restoration. According to the current dynamics, it can be judged that by the end of the year the market will grow by 25-30% compared to 2022, says Yulia Lipatova, managing director of Aeroclub. According to her, the demand for accommodation in Russian hotels from business representatives grew in the first half of 2023 by 22% and already exceeded the level of 2019 by 12%. The average length of stay, as before, was two nights. At the same time, the average cost of a room for the year increased by 10% and amounted to 4,900 rubles. (+13% compared to 2019).

The recovery of the pace of business tourism after the covid period has already happened, the commercial director of Bronevik.com (part of the group MTS) Alexey Isaev. The number of hotel bookings on business trips that companies made through the service in the first half of 2023 increased by 14% year-on-year and 98% of them were made in Russia, the rest – in the CIS countries. The top 3 popular Russian cities for business trips have not changed for several years, these are Moscow (10% of business trips in Russia), St. Petersburg (6%) and Yekaterinburg (2%), says Isaev.

According to Vipservice, the growth in the number of business trips in the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2022 was about 20%, says a company representative. This happened due to the fact that, in particular, there was a significant increase in activity and traffic in large federal centers and in the south of the country – Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar, Rostov, Gorin adds.

OneTwoTrip notes that according to hotel bookings, the number of business trips increased by 2.3 times compared to 2022. And according to air bookings, the number of business trips increased by 88% in a year.

One of the main trends of recovering business tourism in Bronevik.com is the combination of a business trip with a mini-vacation. According to the service, in 2022, every fourth business trip took a weekend, and this trend continues in 2023.