News Flash

New Holiday Dates

Russia recently announced a change in the Russian national holidays which has shortened the long New Year holidays to 8 days and lengthened the May holidays, June holidays and November holidays, which will spread out the period of holidays and the possibility of weekend breaks, more evenly throughout the year and is good news for the travel industry.

January 1-8 (New Year and Orthodox Christmas)
February 22-23 (Day of the Defender of the Motherland)
March 8 -10 (International Woman’s Day)
May 1-4 (Day of Spring and Labor) and 9 -11 (Victory Day)
June 12 – 15 (Day of Russia)
November 1-4 (Day of National Unity)

Latest Russian Travel Statistics

The Russian outbound travel market has shown a 15% growth during the first quarter of 2013 (January-March), according to Rosstat. This means that  3.3 million people travelled for purely leisure purposes (as defined by the very tight criteria of Rosstat), which is a 19% in Leisure travel compared with this period in  2012. In the Top 5 leisure destinations so far in 2014 are: Egypt +42%, Thailand +13%, Finland +43%, China (-15%) and UAE +32%. Figures for Egypt show that the destination has fully recovered from the decline in demand experienced 2 years ago when the political changes caused the Russian government to ban charter flights to Egypt.
However, if we consider the total no. of visitors, including business and visiting friends and family,  the top 5 destinations starts with Finland (1.3 million overall visits), while Estonia jumps to 4th place. Other additions in the top 20 include: Latvia and Lithuania (as Riga is a popular New Year destination); France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland are traditionally popular ski destinations; UK, USA, Israel, Spain and Czech Republic.

Top 20 destinations in Q1, 2013
(Overall purpose of visits, in thousands)

Among the destinations with the biggest growth were Japan +72% (7,600 leisure visits), Jordan +51%, (3,300), Greece +48%, (14,000), USA +48%, (38,700), Tunisia +35%, (2,700) and UAE +32%,( 218,000). Destinations with a decline in demand during the first quarter of 2013 are  Norway -21%, Slovakia -18%, China and Poland -15% each, Hungary -9%, Estonia -8%, UK -2%, and Lithuania -77%. However, it should be noted that these are Rosstat statistics which often contradict with national tourism board statistics of the individual countries.