Masked tourism
Russian inbound tourism may face serious losses already in the offseason due to restrictions by the Chinese authorities on the sale of tours abroad, the Association of Russian Tour Operators (ATOR) said in a statement. The situation with the virus raises questions about the extent of the loss of the inbound tourism business in Russia, the organization stated.
China over the past few years has been a major supplier of classic tourists to Russia. Over 9 months of 2019 goals, 1.3 million tourists from China visited our country, almost 21% more than in the same period of the previous year.
As Executive Director of ATOR Maya Lomidze told TASS, “the main peak of bookings for the high summer season falls on March. And if the situation does not stabilize before the end of March, then we can talk about losses of up to $ 100 million. ” She also estimates that “if the situation does not stabilize before March,” the loss of outbound tourism will amount to approximately 500-700 million rubles.
Russian tour operators emphasize that restrictions on the Chinese tourist flow will affect many sectors of Russian business. These are, first of all, hotels, airlines, and also excursion companies.
According to Mikhail Kogan, head of the analytical research department of the Higher School of Financial Management, according to the Bank of Russia, in January-March last year, Chinese tourists spent $ 264 million in Russia. And this, by the way, was 1.7 times more than a year earlier.
Recall that on January 24, 2020, the Chinese authorities issued an official recommendation to travel companies to stop selling tours within the country and abroad. Since January 28, travel groups from the PRC to Russia have not entered “until the situation normalizes”. True, the PRC authorities did not impose a ban on individual tourism, but the leading online reservation aggregators of the PRC (Ctrip.com, Tuniu.com, etc.) have disabled the service for ordering tickets for foreign destinations, including Russia.
For the first time, the Russian tourism industry is confronted with problems posed by an outbreak of a disease unknown to science. In 2003, when SARS was raging, China was still not a leader in the number of travelers, and Russia was just beginning to feel the growth of interest of foreign tourists, he recalls. Then the total tourist flow in the world decreased by 1.2%, but domestic players noted a 30% increase in the number of arrivals. Now the situation looks different: the Chinese - this is 30% of the total tourist flow to the country.
The situation, according to the expert, is mitigated by the fact that now the low season and the negative impact will be moderate. But, he notes in the Irkutsk region, where Lake Baikal is located, tourists from China account for 60% of the tourist flow, and now it’s just the high season.
There is no need to rely on independent travelers - airlines hastily shut down flights, interrupted passenger services, the border with China in the Far East is closed, and booking systems have been suspended in China itself, says Mikhail Kogan. According to data on Wednesday, the frequency of flights at the five airports closest to Wuhan (the focus of infection) has already decreased by 48% in weekly terms.
A blow to air carriers will be a general decrease in traffic, which has not yet been recorded by statistics. According to the IMF, it is still too early to assess the consequences of the new coronavirus, but investment banks, in particular Morgan Stanley, have already assessed the damage to the Chinese economy in Q1. at 0.5% of GDP. Given the increased weight of the PRC economy in recent years, the damage from the virus, which the WHO assigned the name 2019-nCoV, may exceed the damage from SARS in 2003, then estimated by the Asian Development Bank at $ 69 billion.
First of all, the consequences of the virus will not hit large tourist centers such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi or Kazan. And for those where more than 70% is tied specifically to the tourist flow from China, we can consider the Irkutsk region as an example, where the main center of attraction for the Chinese is Baikal and its popular island, Olkhon. In winter, Chinese citizens are actively interested in this particular object and almost 50% of local firms worked mainly with them.
In addition to those who bought the tour, there are much more independent tourists arriving in the Russian Federation - according to various estimates, up to 1.6 million people, the analyst says. On average, Chinese per day in Russia spend from 200 to 300 dollars on top of the cost of the tour itself, according to general estimates, for 2019 alone, it was Chinese tourists who spent more than 70 billion rubles in Russia, and if there is a sharp decrease this year, this will not only affect tourism industry but also on the economy as a whole.