The Kremlin's public relations department reports that on March 7, 2016, a telephone conversation took place between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi about the need to revive flights from Russia to the land of the pharaohs and to create all the necessary conditions for this.
Let us recall that on October 31, 2015, a large-scale tragedy occurred – a Russian Airbus A321 airliner crashed in the north of the Sinai Peninsula, which was flying from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg. As a result, two hundred twenty-four people died. Not a single passenger or crew member remained alive. The head of the FSB of the Russian Federation, Alexandra Bortnikova, claimed that this was a real terrorist attack. After the tragedy, flights to the Arab Republic were stopped.
Today, the government of the states believes that it is necessary to resume the exchange of tourists in order to normalize the internal situation and regulate the humanitarian situation. In addition, such a decision will help Egypt to get out of the economic crisis, which arose as a result of a significant decrease in the number of foreign tourists. It should be noted that Russians before the tragic incident made up about 40% of the total number of vacationers. Now it will be possible to freely purchase plane tickets online to an Asian country.
The Egyptian government is hopeful that after the influx of Russians resumes, travellers from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Ireland and Slovenia will also return.
The decline in tourism in Egypt has been enormous in recent times. Unemployment has increased in the country, as many jobs in the tourism sector have been lost. Hotels have closed and service personnel have gone on unpaid leave. There is evidence that the hardest hit are Russian animators who have informal employment in hotels. They have stopped receiving their only income and have been effectively thrown out on the street without money or a return ticket home. The crisis has also affected taxi drivers, who used to earn money by delivering tourists to their hotels and driving around the city. Due to the suspension of the flow of visitors from Russia and Great Britain, the country has been losing two hundred and eighty million dollars every month.
The Egyptian government held fruitless negotiations with Russia throughout the entire period of the flight suspension. However, they were successful only in March 2016.
