Up to 27,000 people are stranded abroad with no flights home after Russian travel company Labirint collapsed.
It’s the fourth Russian tour operator to go bankrupt in just three weeks and the fifth during the summer holiday season.
The Ukraine crisis has been blamed for a slump in Russians wanting to travel out of the country.
A drop in the value of the ruble has also affected travel companies.
One tourist at Moscow’s Sheremyetevo airport said: “Some people
spent a whole day at the airport. We had more luck. We stayed at the
hotel.”
Another tourist was not so lucky: “We were forced to leave the hotel,” she said. “They offered us either to pay or to leave.”
Russia’s intelligence service has launched an enquiry into the closure over fraud allegations.
Oleg Safonov, temporary director of the Russian Federal
Tourism Agency:
“We are facing bold-faced, cynical fraud here and we believe that the Interior Ministry has to look into the matter.”
Safonov suggested that Russians should holiday at home, which would be, “a less risky affair,” he said.
It will take around a week to return all stranded tourists back to
Russia.
end quote from:
I was listening to CNN world news tonight and they were saying Aeroflot (a major Russian Airline) is no longer welcome in European or other western countries including the U.S.
Most or all European air carriers and U.S. and Canadian carriers don't fly in to Russia anymore either. So, there likely might be no way home but to either drive there or fly to a nearby country and either drive or take a train or whatever they have to do to get back into Russia from wherever they are in the world.
This is really sounding like (Cold War I) now when Russians couldn't get out of Russia (unless they were KGB agents). I wonder how many Russian travelers might just stay out of Russia now because they might not get out again the way things look in the future?
Later: most of these problems were directly caused by Russian Separatists shooting down the Malaysian Air Lines Passenger plane with a missile. In Time magazine they showed one passenger from this plane after falling through the roof of a house next to a person's bed in their house in Ukraine. Because passengers and pieces of the plane came down over a large area when the missile blew the plane up at 33,000 feet.
This is the Time Magazine with Putin on the cover standing on the cockpit of the shadow of the Malaysian plane.
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