Azerbaijan enters Top 5 countries of inbound tourism to Russia

Experts have named the most popular cities in Russia for traveling during the February holidays. Moscow, St. Petersburg and Sochi became the most popular cities for air travel for the holidays in February 2024, Azernews reports citing Tutu.ru.

Top 10 most popular air travel destinations also include Mineralnye Vody, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tyumen and Samara. At the same time, flights to friendly countries traditionally lead among foreign destinations: Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkiye and Tajikistan.

"Russians will travel most throughout the country - cities of the Russian Federation account for 81.2 percent of air bookings and 97.56 percent of rail trips. Among the most popular air destinations are Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Kaliningrad and Yekaterinburg," the study notes.

As for train travel, during the February holidays the largest number of trips is planned to the two capitals, as well as to Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Adler, Yekaterinburg, Simferopol, Sochi, Nizhny Novgorod and Voronezh.

Note that 480, 000 citizens of Azerbaijan visited Russia last year, which is 45.4% more than in 2022.

Azerbaijan entered the top 10 countries in terms of the number of citizens visiting Russia. In general, the number of foreign tourists who visited Russia last year increased by about 18.6% year-on-year to 15.48 million people.

Last year, the most frequent visitors to Russia were citizens of Kazakhstan - 3.16 million people (26.7% more compared to 2022). The second line in this rating is occupied by citizens of Uzbekistan - 3.11 million people (51.8% more than in 2022). The third line is occupied by Tajikistan - 2.15 million visitors (36.1% more than in the previous year).

The next places are occupied by citizens of Kyrgyzstan (1.14 million people, 31.6% more than in 2022) and China (790 thousand people, 6.1% more than in the previous year).