Two thirds of Russians in 2022 vacationed in Russia

This was announced by the President of the Union of Travel Agencies, a member of the Coordinating Council for Tourism at the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation Sergey Golov during a press conference in the NSN dedicated to summarizing the tourism results of the outgoing year.

As Sergei Golov noted, despite the difficult times, “our fellow citizens rested quite actively, though at different intervals”:

“The rest schedule was so sinusoidal, that is, either rise or fall. But still rested in all available places. Those who had the opportunity turned out to be abroad, but two-thirds rested in Russia.”

Rosstat data for the three quarters of 2022 in terms of the direction and intensity of tourist flows was given by another participant in the press conference – Valery Korovin, Advisor to the Director of the Tourist Assistance Association:

“The results for the fourth quarter have not yet been summed up, so I will give data for three quarters. The set of directions that our citizens chose is somewhat strange, at least it surprised me a little. I will name the countries in descending order of the intensity of the tourist flow: Abkhazia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, United Arab Emirates, Finland, Georgia, Egypt, Armenia, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan. I have been dealing with tourism statistics for many years, but I have never seen such a curious collection. Something has changed a lot this year. But, nevertheless, for 9 months of this year, the total flow amounted, according to Rosstat, to 17 million 148 thousand people. For such a year, this is probably not bad. Although for some reason Belarus was not included in these statistics. There is practically no Europe in the statistics of Rosstat.”

In general, as Valery Korovin noted, compared to previous years, the outbound flow from Russia, of course, has seriously suffered:

“I remember that in Soviet times, it was customary to compare all indicators with the level of 1913. It was customary to measure our whole life with this standard, until new times came and Rosstat appeared. Now we have the best year for tourism – this is 2019. It is good in all respects: both in domestic tourism, and in outbound, and even inbound tourism. Now there is no inbound tourism at all. Exit is limited to those countries where you can travel. But the internal one literally blossomed: here, in my opinion, for the first time in the life of our country, seriously, with the undoubted help of the state, we received a big boost.

Commenting on the above statistics, a practicing tour operator – the founder and CEO of the ART-TOUR tour operator Dmitry Arutyunov emphasized that, in his opinion, they are close to reality:

“Although there are some distortions. Since this year, unfortunately, our country was connected by direct flights with a small number of countries, Turkey and Dubai were considered by many tourists simply as a kind of transport hub, that is, they simply made transfers there. As far as the leadership of Abkhazia is concerned, these data also, from my point of view, contain a certain slyness. The leadership of this direction is explained, of course, not by the fact that all the guys from the north suddenly decided to go on vacation to Gagra … It’s just that many vacationers in Sochi, say, visit Abkhazia as part of a weekend tour, that is, they cross the border, and Rosstat data is on this statistics and are based. Given this, we have to admit that Turkey has become the number 1 destination in 2022. It not only received 2.5 million tourists from Russia, plus Istanbul and Antalya assumed the role of a hub: for example, if a Russian tourist flies to Mexico via Istanbul, Rosstat does not see that he is flying to Mexico, he believes that the tourist is in Turkey. And there are a lot of such tourists.”

Speaking about the leading trends in 2022, Dmitry Arutyunov pointed to a very short planning horizon for Russians who are going on tours. According to him, now the depth of booking tours remains minimal.

As Sergei Golov summed up, summing up the discussion of the tourist results of the year, now people do not fly where they want, but where they can and where there is enough money …

Sergei Ishkov.

Pictured: Lake Senezh.

Photo by Nina Donskikh