‘Speaking of the Turkish tourist market, I’d say there are some full-fledged operators who book flights and make direct hotel reservations and thus come up with a ready package; also, there are some operators who don’t have any direct contact with the hotels or air carriers or don’t operate on a large enough scale to do massive booking, so these operators borrow some of the packages from other companies. For one, Vasco, a Turkish-Austrian operator with a daughter enterprise in Russia (known as Detour) borrowed our reservations for Yekaterinburg-Antalya and Chelyabinsk-Antalya flights but failed to meet their contractual obligations in terms of payments. So we’ve had to deal with the continuous delays and debts since April 2008. Last week, all the payments stopped completely, which is why we stopped offering Detour any reservations,’ More Travel’s CFO Dmitriy Kushev said to UrBC.

In the meantime, Vasco and Detour have recently been reported to have gone bust.

‘This was something we did not quite expect; we did sustain some losses since we had to urgently sell all the bookings reserved for Detour. As there were a lot of bookings, I don’t think it’s possible to sell everything even with some minimal damage to us. Detour used to book 50 seats for Chelyabinsk-Antalya flights and 110 to 120 seats for Yekaterinburg-Antalya flights every week,’ Dmitriy Kushev explained.

‘Vasco and Detour’s bankruptcy is going to result in short-received profits for us this year. I don’t believe we are going to experience any financial difficulties, however,’ he added.

‘Despite certain problems the whole issue originates, the Turkish market tends to become somewhat more viable, as we’ll have to rescale the volume of flights from Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk. As a result, all the market players might have a chance to make a profit,’ Kushev said.