MADRID, Spain.- The Russian airline Aeroflot began selling tickets to the Varadero resort. The flights, which will resume from next July 1, will initially have two weekly frequencies, Thursdays and Saturdays; but it is expected that a third will be added on Tuesdays from September 2023.
According to Aeroflot, quoted by the official media Cubans, the flights will depart from Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport and will be operated by Rossiya airlines, a subsidiary of Aeroflot, with Boeing 777 wide-body aircraft.
Recently, the co-chair of the Cuba-Russia Intergovernmental Commission, Dmitri Chernyshenko, during an official visit to the island advertisement that flights between Cuba and Russia would resume in July of this year.
During his stay on the island, in a meeting with the Cuban Minister of Tourism, Juan Carlos García Granda, Chernishenko declared that Russia hopes to send up to half a million tourists to Cuba annually and become the main issuer of tourists to this country.
For his part, García Granda highlighted that Russia is among the four countries that send the most tourists to the island, and recalled that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia sent up to 178,000 visitors.
According to official data, in 2020 a total of 146,151 Russian tourists arrived in Cuba. While in mid-2021 more than half of registered tourists were Russians.
Direct flights between Russia and Cuba had been suspended since March 2022, due to the sanctions imposed on Moscow by his invasion of Ukraine. The democratic world’s condemnation of Russia led to the cancellation of flights between the Asian country and the island, forcing trips to Havana to make connections in cities such as Istanbul.
Russian tourism is one of the regime’s big bets to boost the sector and meet its distant goal of receiving 3.5 million tourists this year.
