According to Russian Federal State Statistic Services, 6.4732 million Russians travelled abroad. This is 6.6% higher than the same period of the previous year, but still 50% less than the same period of 2011.
Turkey is still the most popular destination even after a reduction of 17% on the last year. The reason for the decline was explained here not too long ago.
The top ten remains stable, even though we can observe some significant transpositions.
Egypt recovers the second position among the most popular destinations, pushing off China to the third place. Being compared to the unsuccessful first half of 2011 (57% loss), the country gained 64.5% but still hasn’t reached the most successful indices of 2010.
Germany has risen to fifth position from sixth, that was previously held Finland. For the first time in many years Finland went down from fifth to ninth position. We will explore reasons of this fall in our tomorrow’s issue.
Spain went up from position eight to position six which can be explained by friendly visa procedures and issuing multi-entry visas.
Another great leap from tenth position to seventh was made by UAE. Reasons being expansion of domestic destinations in the UAE, price decreases, various hotels special offers and the increase of the non-winter demand growth.
Italy dropped one position but still gained 1% compared to the first half of 2011.
Greece has also moved down one position, but the first half year might not be representative for this country, because Russians travel there later in the year.
Mexico has entered the leading group (173.5%) as well. It is followed by Vietnam (108%). Great results for Tunisia having taken the third place (91.8%). Be reminded that last year it lost about 40% of the tourist flow.
We saw similar growth from Hong Kong h (91.6%).
Egypt ranks in fifth place (64.5%) on the chart. Japan has restored its prior positions on the chart and follows Egypt (62.7%). It will be recalled that in the first six months of last year Japan lost 52%.
Now let’s turn to the countries that have lost their growth rate in the reporting period. It’s interesting that two neighboring countries which are Sweden (-42%) and Finland (-41%) are nearly sharing this position. Lithuania ranks the third place (-25%). We have already commented on the «Finnish version» here and now let’s figure out is there a real demand decrease for Sweden and Lithuania, or it is just a mystery of the Russian statistics.
Russian tourists traveling abroad in the first half of 2012
(thousands of trips)
