Estonia, Good for Business, Tourism

"It's a tradition that Russians would visit Estonia at the end of the year and at the beginning of the new year, and we could see them in our city this time as well," the association's board chairman Verni Loodmaa told.

He said that the precise figures have yet to be found out.

"I believe the rate of growth may have been between 5 and 10 percent," Loodmaa said.

The head of the Estonian Hotel and Restaurant Association observed, however, that the numbers of Russian tourists coming here now as still considerably smaller than what the country used to see earlier. 

"There's plenty of room for development and it's necessary to go on doing sales work in Russia," Loodmaa said.

Loodmaa also described the reduction in the share of Finnish tourists visiting Estonia as a cause for concern. 

"We witnessed it in almost all months of last year, and it definitely is a place where Estonian tourism stakeholders must significantly step up their sales efforts," he said, explaining that whatever dynamics in Finnish tourist numbers can be explicitly felt in the Estonian tourism sector.