March 4, 2015. Travelers from the Urals are now making trips to Egypt even less often than people from other parts of Russia, the Executive Director of Ural Tourism Association Mikhail Maltsev told UrBC.

RBC refers to Egypt’s statistic-gathering agencies as stating that the inflow of Russian tourists into the country dropped by 12%, or down to 199,500 people, in December 2014.

‘The decrease in the number of Ural travelers to Egypt was higher than Russia’s average last December, since Egypt-bound flights disappeared from Chelyabinsk, Perm, and Tyumen airports altogether, so everyone had to fly from Yekaterinburg. This is why the picture looks grimmer for the Urals on the whole than it does for Yekaterinburg and its Koltsovo Airport, where the drop is the same as the country’s average,’ Maltsev explained.

He feels, nevertheless, that the trips to Egypt market suffered less than the market of travel to other destinations such as Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.

‘Trips to Egypt did not grow a lot more expensive at the end of last year, by 1,500 RUR on average; in fact, their price in US dollars actually went down considerably, partly because of the difficult situation the country is in,’ Maltsev said.