Moscow and St. Petersburg Rank Among World's Top 100 Travel Destinations

MasterCard has published an annual ranking of the most world’s popular cities for travelers. And guess what? This year, Moscow and St. Petersburg were included in the top 100, according to the report. The ranking is based on payment system statistics.

Moscow ranked 59th in the list, the same place as last year. The payment card company’s analysts project that by the end of 2016, the Russian capital will be visited by 1.8 million foreigners, who will spend approximately $945 million.

St. Petersburg dropped one notch, ranking 85th in the list. MasterCard expects the city to be visited by 988,000 tourists by the end of 20166, who will spend about $510 million.

Additionally, Novosibirsk, another Russian city, took 117th place with 250,000 foreign tourists.  Yekaterinburg ranked 120th (203,000 tourists), while Vladivostok took 131th place in the rating list, with 23,000 tourists visiting the city.

Bangkok proved to be the number one city for travelling: about 21.47 million foreigners visited the city. London took second place (19.88 million) and Paris was third (18.03 million).