A couple booked a flight from St. Petersburg to the Maldives to spend New Year holidays and seemingly beat a local flight price record. An incredibly expensive trip is not the only one of that kind, it’s just a bit more than a similarly priced flight to Dubai.
An air tickets booking service Aviasales.ru reported about three most expensive flights of the coming January long holidays season. The first two belonged to St. Petersburg residents, and that’s not surprisingly despite the fact that the richest city in the country is Moscow. The paradox can be easily explained as Moscow residents enjoy rather cheap flights due to big air traffic that brings much offer and, consecutively, attractive fares.
So, number one in the Aviasales’s hit-parade is the flight by a couple to the Maldives for $16,500. Coming in second is the flight to Dubai for nearly $14,700. The third place goes to Moscow, it was something about $9,640 for a trip to Delhi.
All this is in line with the current outbound tourism trends in Russia. Numbers of Russians willing to meet the New Year’s arrival abroad are increasing after the decrease in 2014-2015 caused by the fall of the ruble against the dollar and euro. Now the national currency is still weak but stable with the economy creating a situation when the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Yes, the situation is nothing new to the history of Russia, one of such periods took place one hundred ago, in 1916 and 1917. Isn’t it symbolic that one of the last monuments travelers see on their way to the Pulkovo airport to make their super-luxurious flights is the statue of Vladimir Lenin, the father of the 1917 Russian Revolution, a centenary of which we’re going to celebrate next year?