According to the results of 2022, the flow of foreign tourists to Russia fell by 90% compared to 2021, when the world was still subject to travel restrictions due to the coronavirus.
According to The Moscow Times, according to the general director of one of the Russian tour companies, in 2022 tour operators accepted only a few hundred foreign tourists. Before the pandemic, 300-400 thousand foreign tourists came to Russia annually (including individual and business tourists).
At the same time, according to official data, the decline in tourist flow in the Russian Federation is significantly lower. According to the Association of Tour Operators of Russia, 180,000-190,000 tourists came to Russia during the year, not including post-Soviet countries. Last year, according to the FSB, 288 thousand tourists came to Russia, that is, the decrease was only 34-37.5%.
As the vice-president of the Russian Union of the Tourism Industry, Dmytro Horin notes that this year there were no mass group visits at all. They came only for business meetings and individual tourists.
Major players in the inbound market managed to attract five or six small groups, the general director of one of the travel agencies clarified.
According to market participants, tourists stopped coming to Russia for four reasons: difficulties in obtaining visas, a ban on flights, the impossibility of using international bank cards, and a “negative informational background around the country.”