Aide to the President and Chair of the Maritime Collegium Nikolai Patrushev proposed increasing the number of Russian ports in the Arctic and the Russian Far East that foreign tourist ships are permitted to visit. He noted that maritime cruises are a rapidly growing segment of the tourism market.

“We are witnessing reignited interest in cruises along the coast and islands of the Far Eastern Federal District and the Arctic zone of Russia,” Patrushev said at a Maritime Collegium meeting. “However, foreign cruise ships can visit a limited number of Russian ports and port points, with a third of them prohibiting tourists from disembarking.”

As a matter of fact, tour operators using foreign-flagged vessels cannot create a competitive tourist product due to their inability to visit the most attractive tourist destinations on most popular routes, including the Chukotka coast, the Kuril Islands, the Franz Josef Archipelago, and Novaya Zemlya, the Aide to the President said.

According to him, the most promising territories for organising maritime cruises include the ones with developed port coastal infrastructure, such as the Sakhalin Region, Kamchatka, and Primorye and Khabarovsk territories. The most interesting routes include the Far Eastern cruise line starting from Vladivostok which takes tourists to remote destinations in the Primorye Territory, as well as the cities of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, as well as the Kuril Islands, and Arctic sea cruises.