Independent travellers go for Baltics and Thailand to meet the New Year

The choices that independent travellers made for their New Year's holidays were very closely related to the sales statistics previously predicted by tour operators. According to hotel booking system Oktogo.ru, the majority of reservations were made for the Baltic states. This made up to a third part of all the bookings for December – January.

There have also been a lot of search requests for New Year vacations in Italy, France, Czech Republic, Germany and Finland. However among beach destinations, Thailand, chosen by 10% of Russian travellers, is in the lead. As for Egypt, most bookings for this destination were made for the period after the New Year. This year, Mexico entered the top ten with a number of demands in December (4%). It is those who are fans of mountain-skiing that are attracted to Italy, Germany, France, Austria and Bulgaria. Popular ski resorts in Russia are Krasnaya Polyana and Ural.

On average the Russians tend to book hotels around a month and a half prior to their actual trip. This average is related to both New Years holidays and the summer season. Near a half of reservations cover a period from December 31 to January 1. The earliest tourists begin their Christmas trips on the December 24. So the most demanded date to start on is December 30 . The second wave is usually expected around January 2-3; 30 % of all bookings land on these dates. For the majority of trips the duration was between 4-7 days. “It is already possible to tell due to the activity of reservations made in September growing five times in comparison within the same period of last year, and the first week of October 2011 was an indicator third” - reports Director general of Oktogo.ru Mrs. Marina Kolesnik.