Suspension of visaless regime with Turkey not critical for Russian tourism – ATOR

“For inbound tourism the suspension of the visaless regime is not critical, because its flow from Turkey was insignificant”, Lomidze said.

Turkey’s foreign minister has said that diplomacy will be the cure to resolving divisions between Ankara and Moscow. “We are confident that be tensions will be reduced in the coming future”. We can not lose theRussianmarket which is the second largest source of Turkey’s tourism sector. “Therefore, we would enter a hard period”, said Firuz Baglikaya, head of Detur. “We believe we can tackle the issue via diplomatic ways”.

President Vladimir Putin called the downing of the Russian jet a stab in the back and added that Turkey was supporting terrorism. It would be wrong to let the tensions between Russian Federation and Turkey impact farming, commercial and economic ties, he said. Russia supplies nearly 70 percent of the total gas Turkey consumes every year as Russia’s Gazprom sells around 27 billion cubic metres of Russian natural gas to Turkey in a year.

The number of tourists arriving through the end of October this year also saw a decline to 33.06 million from 33.52 million from last year, down 1.4 percent.

“As far as outbound tourism is concerned, this decision is not critical at all”.