Russian travel market to return to pre-recession level by the end of this year

The world financial crisis caused 17,8% decrease of Russian travel sector. The total volume of sales in travel market amounts to 782 billion roubles on 2009. However last year the market showed 15,3% increase, but still failed to reach the 2008 level. These figures were presented by an analytic of RBC’s consulting department Mr. Sergey Khitrov during the “Optimization of cooperation between tour operators and travel agents” forum at the MITT-2011 trade fair. Mr. Khitrov noted that the RBC’s analysts expect Russian travel market to be back to its pre-recession level as early as this year. 

Within the overall volumes of travel services 68% goes to domestic tourism, 28%  - to outbound and 5% - to inbound. Total revenue from outbound tourism amounts to 379 billion roubles while inbound yielded only 70 billion. As for the domestic travels the Russians spent 453 billion roubles.

The most popular countries with Russian tourists in 2010 were Turkey (25.5% of the total number of trips), Egypt (22.6%) and Ukraine (15%). Some other countries showed quite a positive results as well: Thailand (8%), Finland (7.7%), Italy (6.3%), Germany (6.1%), Spain and France both earned slightly more than 5%.

According to the RBC consulting department’s polling, 41% of the Russians travelled more often in 2010, and the trips were mostly longer than previous year. 28% of pollees were going to have longer holidays than they had in 2009.

Sergey Khitrov reminded that the international inbound tourism grew down by 4.2%, the total number of arrivals counted 880 million people. However the year 2010 became a big surprise for experts – the overall growth was 5.5%, and this year is expected to show 4.5% increase.

While the European market is still recovering from the recession, Middle East and Asia and Pacific regions showed rapid growth: 16% and 14% respectively. It’s quite clear that the recent events such as Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, disorders in many countries and war in Libya, the Japanese earthquake and radioactive hazard can change the region’s figures significantly.