MOSCOW, August 25. /TASS/. Chinese tourists are expected to spend more than 72 billion rubles, or 1.1 billion US dollars, in Russia in 2019, the World Without Borders, a travel association uniting some 200 companies working with the Chinese tourism market, said on Sunday.

The forecast is based on the Russian Central Bank’s official statistics for the first quarter of 2019. Thus, according to the Central Bank, Chinese citizens spent 264 million US dollars in Russia in January-March 2019 to outstrip other nations in terms of spending in Russia.

According to the Russian border service, Chinese nationals made 342,000 trips to Russia in the first quarter of 2019.

"Preliminary estimates of the World Without Borders’ experts indicate that the number of tourism trips from China to Russia may reach 1.4-1.5 million. So, the overall volume of spending will be at least 1.1 billion US dollars or even more as tourists typically spend more money in high season," the association said.

The tourist flow from China to Russia went up by 24.5% in the first six months of 2019 on the same period last year, the association said earlier.

Most popular cities are Moscow and St. Petersburg, where aggregate growth was 43%.