The most reliable way to get
to Crimea today is to buy a plane ticket
from Moscow to Simferopol At the end of last week, the international payment system Visa distributed a statement saying that the company can no longer support the issuance and acceptance of cards in Crimea, as well as their servicing in local ATMs. A little later, MasterCard distributed a virtually identical statement. The companies' press services explained the suspension of service by the introduction of international sanctions against Russia and Crimea.
Recall that the recommendation to take cash to the peninsula, not relying on bank cards, was also issued by the Association of Tour Operators of Russia (ATOR) at the beginning of summer. It was then that global changes began in the banking system in Crimea – Ukrainian banks were forced to leave, and their place was taken by Russian competitors far from the top ten.
“Now we are warning vacationers about the need to take cash with them. But the situation around Crimea is so widely covered that the vast majority of tourists are already aware of all such nuances,” noted one of the representatives of ATOR.
The association hopes that for the upcoming New Year holidays, the tourist flow to Crimea from Russian regions will more than triple last year's figures. “We see good demand for New Year holidays in Crimea. Mostly, tourists are asking for the Southern Coast of Crimea – Yalta. Hotels and sanatoriums are in roughly equal demand,” noted one of the travel companies that is a member of ATOR.
However, the optimistic forecasts of representatives of the tourism industry may be dashed against the stormy waves of the Kerch Strait – unfavorable weather conditions almost daily halt ferry services between Crimea and mainland Russia. There are also no options for rail travel: on December 26, the Ukrainian railway operator announced restrictions on the route of trains to and from the peninsula. From now on, transportation of any goods between mainland Ukraine and Crimea is also prohibited. “In order to ensure traffic safety, Ukrzaliznytsia is limiting the route of trains in the Crimean direction to the stations Novoalekseevka and Kherson. Trains that will depart starting December 27 will go only to these stations,” said the press service of Ukrzaliznytsia.
So air travel is the only trouble-free option to get to Crimea today. Every day, more than a dozen flights arrive at Simferopol Airport from Moscow, Krasnodar, Yekaterinburg and other Russian cities. Airfare prices, although they are steep, tourists have no choice.
Note that according to the latest data announced by the Ministry of Resorts and Tourism of Crimea, in 2014, 4 million people vacationed on the peninsula, the vast majority of whom were tourists from Russia. Crimea's total income from the tourism industry in the outgoing year amounted to 107 billion rubles, and tax revenues to the republican budget from tourism facilities exceeded 1.5 billion rubles. Whether the hopes for the New Year's boom will be justified will be shown in the coming days.