The European Union has lost nearly 40% of the Russian tourists in the first half of the year

In the first half of the year, arrivals from Russia to the EU decreased by 37.4% compared with the same period of the last year, according to the press secretary of the Russian Union of Travel Industry Irina Tyurina. She explained that these figures are based on statistics from Russian Statistics Service, which does not take into account indicators of Ireland and Luxembourg. "In the first half of the year there were 6.47 million trips from Russia to the EU with different objectives. This is 26.6% less than in the same period of the last year. Among these 1.95 million trips were made with tourism purposes, which is 37.4% less than in the same period in 2014. The decline in number of Russian tourists in Europe will be even greater if we look at the data of the countries which are not included in the European Union. In particular, the decline for Norway was 37%, for Switzerland - 28%, for Montenegro - 14.5% and for Serbia - 11%", Irina Tyurina said. She also noted that the negative dynamics is associated with a high rate of the euro. The main outsider in the number of tourists from Russia is Lithuania (-73%). Behind her is Greece (-53.5%), in third place is Austria (-43.4%). The demand is significantly reduced for Spain, Croatia, Czech Republic, Sweden, Finland, Bulgaria, and Italy. For these countries the fall in tourist traffic amounted from 35% to 43%.