Vladimir Kantorovich, the First Vice-President of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia and Alexander Radkov, the Deputy Head of the Federal Agency for Tourism announced during the press conference on Wednesday the first forecasts about the sales of the summer season. In particular, it was mentioned, that the travel market has been recovering from the crisis and has almost reached the indicators of 2008.
According to Vladimir Kantorovich, 2010 summer season may show the record number of the tourists travelling abroad. It can be confirmed by the statistics of the growth of number of the tourists for many destinations including: Maldives (80%), Thailand (70%) and Cuba (50%). The leading countries remained the same: Turkey, Egypt, Spain, Greece, Thailand, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Dominican Republic and Czech Republic.
In addition to the discussion of the market tendencies, such important questions as the protection of the rights of the tourists and the security supervision were also raised during the press conference. A lot of Russians still don’t pay a lot of attention to medical insurance. Vladimir Kantorovich noted that very often when a difficult situation occurs, the people don’t have any insurance or just have some insurance but it doesn’t cover all medical expenses. In general, it’s a serious problem of the Russian tourism, as there are no any laws obliging tour operators to insure the tourists in a certain way. The insurance is obligatory if the country, where the tourist is planning to go, requires it. For example, it concerns Schengen States. But there are no such requirements for entering Turkey and Egypt, where the majority of the Russians spend their vacations. Meanwhile, there is a high risk of car accidents, heat exhaustion and other emergencies in these countries. Source: www.atorus.ru
