Market Trends: Where Are Russian’s Spending New Years?

85% of Russians are going to spend the New Year at home, according to a survey conducted by Yandex.Travel service .

The main reasons are the lack of funds (34% of the respondents answered this way) and the habit of spending their holidays at home (29%). Many did not plan trips due to the coronavirus: people are stopped by both the risk of infection (13%) and restrictive measures (9%).

Analysts at Yandex.Travel have found out where the few who are still going on a New Year trip will go. To do this, we studied the interest in booking hotels in different cities for the vacation period: we calculated the transitions from the service to the sites of aggregator partners.

The majority of Russians who go somewhere for the New Year holidays are planning holidays within the country, but there are also those who are going abroad. The most popular foreign destinations are Turkey, Abkhazia and the UAE.

The most popular Russian destination is Sochi. The second and third places are taken by Moscow and St. Petersburg. The top five also included Yalta and Kazan

Top 15 Russian destinations in popularity on Yandex.Travel:

  1. Sochi
  2. Moscow
  3. St. Petersburg
  4. Yalta
  5. Kazan
  6. Kislovodsk
  7. Kaliningrad
  8. Anapa
  9. Gelendzhik
  10. Yaroslavl
  11. Alushta
  12. Sevastopol
  13. Pyatigorsk
  14. Nizhny Novgorod
  15. Belokurikha
Dan Taylor
Dan Taylor is an experienced SEO consultant and has worked with brands and companies on optimizing for Russia (and Yandex) for a number of years. Winner of the inaugural 2018 TechSEO Boost competition, webmaster at HreflangChecker.com and Sloth.Cloud, and founder of RussianSearchNews.com.