Spotlight interview

Interview to Alexey Vengin, CEO at Profi.Travel

1. What sets the Russian outbound tourism market apart?

 

Russian tourists are in the top 5 in terms of tourist flow in many popular travel destinations. Russia is 8th in the ranking of countries in terms of tourists who are spending the most on trips and length of travel being +7 days. Although Russian citizens need a visa to travel to some destinations, there are 87 visa-free countries available – that is why the Russian market is considered very promising and attractive.

Unlike many European countries, a Russian tourist still buys tours in travel agencies – usually to popular beach destinations. However, the number of tourists who book flights, hotels and other services independently is growing year by year. Therefore, when promoting tourism products and destinations, communications should be built with both consumer and travel trade segments in mind.

 

2. What B2B and B2C solutions are useful to attract Russian tourists?

 

Russia is a huge country – it takes 12 hours to fly from one border to the other so communication between business partners often takes place online: chat in messengers and social networks, study via online trainings, read B2B portals, participate in virtual fairs. Promotion via travel trade offline channels and communication is less and less common.

At the end of 2018, the Internet penetration in Russia among people aged 16-29 years was 99%, 88% in the 30-54 years category. Like China, Russia has its own Internet resources, social network, popular news portals and national search engine. Therefore, the channels used to attract and communicate to potential customers are very different than the ones of US, Europe and China.

Among the population the percentage of frequent travelers is not very high, so advertising campaigns with greater coverage may not have an effect, you need a very accurate target audience in order to avoid dissipating your marketing budget.

 

3. What are the advantages of Profi.Travel in the tourism market?

 

Profi.Travel is the primary industry media in the Russian tourism market and in the CIS countries with 20 years of experience in the promotion of tourism products and destinations. We work with the ministries of tourism, hotels and hosting companies from more than 100 countries.

Profi.Travel is the leading web portal for travel professionals with daily coverage on business trends, online fairs and online training services. Every year we host 8 thematic online fairs by destinations. This unique format combines the best of traditional offline tourism exhibitions with the benefits of online communication. In the 5 years of activity 527 companies and destinations have become fair exhibitors and we’ve hosted 80 online training courses dedicated to the tourism product of destinations, resorts, hotels and tour operators.

For what regards the B2C segment, we run high-performance integrated advertising campaigns, using the advantages of an automated advertising purchasing system (programmatic). We are also exclusive representatives in Russia of Travel Audience by Amadeus, an advanced travel solution.
Travel Programmatic uses GDS Amadeus’ users data about their travel history preferences, which allows to target specific tourists’ segments with advertising messages that have a greater coverage.
Profi.Travel is also the official house of one of the most visited tourism portals in the Runet – Tourister.ru. Tourister’s has a monthly audience of over 5 million unique visitors with 8 million page views.

We are going to offer our partners expertise, high level of service and effective tools to enter the Russian market. We look forward to discovering new travel destinations for Russian tourists together with ETOA members.

Alexey Vengin

CEO, Profi.Travel

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