Aeroflot will start selling tickets to resorts through a tour operator

Aeroflot and Biblio-Globus signed a contract according to which the airline will start providing the tour operator with seats on its flights for passengers purchasing tours.The company plans to transport 9 million tourists in three years

Aeroflot and Russia's largest tour operator Biblio-Globus signed a three-year agreement on the implementation of a long-term transportation program: the airline will provide the tour operator with blocks of seats on its flights for the transport of passengers and luggage, Aeroflot's press service told RBC.

“The flight program within the framework of cooperation with Biblio-Globus will include a total of 60 international and domestic destinations. For the development of the route network, Aeroflot intends to widely use the tourism potential of the already formed hubs in St. Petersburg and Krasnoyarsk, as well as the recently opened regional bases in Sochi, Mineralnye Vody and other tourist clusters of Russia,” the press service emphasized.

In total, within the framework of the contract, Aeroflot plans to transport approximately 9 million tourists, and already in 2023, as expected, at least 2.6 million seats will be transferred to Biblio-Globus. “If we take the predicted passenger traffic of Aeroflot for 2023, then 12-15% will fall on the share of tourists <...> Biblio-Globus pays a fixed price for each seat. For us, this is a profitable contract. This is tens of billions of rubles of additional guaranteed revenue per year,” the company said.

In total, the airline plans to open 33 foreign flight destinations, including:

From Moscow  - to Bangkok, Phuket, Goa, Colombo, Male, Seychelles, Istanbul, Antalya, Bodrum, Dalaman, Dubai, Hurghada, Sharm el-Sheikh; From Sochi  - to Istanbul, Antalya, Bodrum, Dalaman, Dubai; From Yekaterinburg  - to Istanbul, Antalya,
Goa; From St. Petersburg  - to Istanbul,
Antalya; From Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok  - to Bangkok, to Phuket; From Kazan, Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod and Mineralnye Vody  - to Antalya.

Within Russia, the airline plans to open 27 destinations from different Russian cities to Sochi, St. Petersburg and Mineralnye Vody.

Biblio-Globus is the only tour operator that was included in the rating of the largest private companies according to Forbes in 2021: the company ranked 174th in the rating with revenue of 59.5 billion rubles. In the same year, Sheremetyevo Airport acquired 75% of the tour operator for 410 million rubles.

In June 2022, Biblio-Globus reported that more than 528 thousand tourists had been sent on vacation since the beginning of the year. Before the COVID-19 pandemic , according to Thomas Cook, the tour operator served about 3 million tourists a year, half of them rested in Russia.

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As Andrey Chikhanchin, Deputy General Director for Commerce and Finance of Aeroflot, pointed out, against the background of changes in the air transportation market conditions for Russian airlines, “associated with limited access to highly profitable global markets”, tourist destinations are becoming the main driver for the development of the Aeroflot network.

“Cooperation with the largest participant in the Russian tourism industry will allow us to quickly deploy a large route network, providing our passengers with the best travel product in terms of price and quality. The activation of flights to tourist destinations will make it possible to use Aeroflot's aircraft fleet as intensively as possible, Chikhanchin noted.

After the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, Western countries, including the EU and the USA , closed their airspace to Russian aircraft, and also demanded the return of all leased aircraft. In December 2022, Aeroflot CEO Sergei Aleksandrovsky said in an interview with RBC that 13 out of 357 airline aircraft were arrested abroad. At the same time, he noted that the cost of air tickets in Russia in 2022 remained at the level of the last two years and even decreased by 6.5% compared to 2019.

In addition, due to the special operation, 11 airports in southern Russia, including such large ones as Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Anapa and Gelendzhik, suspended their work.

Nevertheless, already in October, ATOR Vice President Sergey Romashkin said that since the beginning of 2022, trips in Russia have grown by 10% in terms of physical measurements and by 20% in terms of amounts spent on travel. “We attribute this to post-COVID recovery growth. But what will happen to domestic tourism in the light of recent events - only next year will show. Dagestan showed the maximum percentage of growth this year: over 40%,” Romashkin noted.