Intourist predicted prices and discounts for early booking of Turkey

“Intourist tour operator in the summer season - 2018 sent to Turkey almost 700 thousand Russian tourists,” said Sergey Tolchin, the executive director of the company. He also informed about discounts and prices for tours to Turkey in the next season. According to Mr. Tolchin, with the indicators mentioned above, Intourist became the fourth largest Russian tour operator on the Turkish direction. “This is a good result, but we are not happy with it. In the season 2018, it was planned to send 850,000 tourists to Turkey. But problems with air transportation at the beginning of the season (when our partner, the Turkish carrier Atlasglobal, did not receive all the permissions for flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg) somewhat degraded our plans. Nevertheless, we didn’t cancel the announced plans and for the 2019 season we plan already to increase our share in Turkey to 20% with an indicator of at least 850,000 tourists,” said the top manager of Intourist. As Mr. Tolchin said, in 2018 the Russian tour operators organized on Turkish destination (Antalya and Dalaman) over 4.5 million seats in total, which exceeded the result of 2017 by 15%. According to the tour operator, in the period from 2013 to 2018, Intourist increased 5 times the volume of tourist traffic to Dalaman, and 6 times to Antalya. As a result, Intourist today is on the first line by number of sending Russian tourists to Dalaman airport (resorts of the south-west coast of Turkey: Marmaris, Dalaman, Fethiye, and others) with a market share in this area of ​​over 44%. On the Antalya coast of Turkey, the share of Intourist, according to his calculations, is 13%. “This year Intourist performed flights to Turkey from 16 cities of Russia. We have increased our volumes in Turkey by 40%, reaching 15% of the entire out coming market on this destination,” said the executive director of Intourist. According to Sergei Tolchin, in the season-2019, prices for holidays in Turkey will increase by about 10-15%. “Today, against the background of the growth of the Russian tourist flow, the Turkish hoteliers have overstated expectations towards the Russian market for the summer 2019. They believe that the Russian market will grow by another 15–20%, plus the European market will also grow. All this leads to the fact that with such demand from key markets, the cost of living in Turkey will increase,” the expert said. On the other hand, according to Mr. Tolchin, the Turkish partners also show some flexibility, responding to the results of sales at early booking stage.