MOSCOW, November 23. /TASS/. The revenues of the business travel industry in Russia due to the situation with the coronavirus decreased by 80% compared to 2019, Head of the Department of State Tourism Projects and Tourism Safety of the Federal Agency for Tourism Elena Lysenkova said on Monday,
"Before the end of this year and, according to our expectations, in the first half of next year, event activity throughout the country will not be restored. The business travel and travel sector has not recovered, which led to a significant drop in the income of these enterprises, and still the largest cities of the country and hotel and tourism enterprises [in this sector] are experiencing a drop in revenues to 80% from the indicators of 2019," Lysenkova said.
The situation is better in the hotels of the resort segment, where there was an increased demand in the summer, and the season was extended to October due to good weather, but even here it is impossible to talk about a complete recovery, she said.
"It [working with a good workload from July to October] helped restore the economic indicators of these enterprises, although, unfortunately, it did not allow them, even taking into account the increased demand, to return the lost financial indicators of the beginning of summer and spring of last year," Lysenkova added.
At the same time, in March - June of this year, most tourist enterprises "experienced a drop in revenue of up to 90%" compared to 2019, with a few exceptions for those organizations that provided observatory services or placed medical workers in their rooms, she said.
In late December 2019, Chinese officials informed the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia. On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.