Ukraine is prepared for a post-war recovery of tourism, the chair of the country’s State Agency for Tourism Development has said. Amid ITB Berlin, the world’s largest travel industry event, Mariana Oleskiv told The Independent, “We welcome our guests if they don’t come with guns.”
The revival of Ukraine’s tourist industry
Despite being in the middle of an active conflict, Ukraine is initiating a campaign to pique the interest of international tourists and reassure them it has the service resources and infrastructure to welcome them back as soon as the war is over. What’s more, its economy needs the boost.
“Any money that people will spend in Ukraine will help the economy to recover,” Oleskiv said. “We have now the brand of Ukraine developed and well known around the world. But it’s not associated with tourism. We need to create interest to Ukraine not just as people that you support and you feel sorry for – but also the country you want to support by visiting.”
The move follows a memorandum by the United Nation’s World Travel Organisation in 2023, to commit to supporting the “revival of tourism in Ukraine”.
“It’s very beautiful”
Oleskiv was at pains to point out that not all Ukraine, which, at 603,628 km2, is Europe’s second largest country, is affected by the war in the way people might imagine. “People think about Ukraine,” she said, “maybe about bravery, about war, about destruction. So they see the picture that Ukraine looks like Mariupol, for example.” But she went on, “We have many cities that look like this, but it’s around 20 per cent or 30 per cent of our territory that is occupied. The rest is alright. It’s very beautiful. We have good infrastructure and we have very good hotels, good service, internet coverage.”
Cafes, bars, restaurants, hotels – open
Ukraine was ready for a tourism surge in 2020 when Oleskiv started in her current role, with a flurry of international flight connections to Odessa in the offing. But Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion put a stop to all foreign visits.
While the country does not want to develop “dark tourism”, telling the story of the war for “future generations” would be important, Oleskiv acknowledged. But she was keen to emphasise the positive, noting that “We still have tourism – domestic tourism – in Ukraine. We have cafes, bars, restaurants, working. We have hotels open and actually during last winter, when we had blackout, very often the hotels were that place where people could have food, charge their phones because they all had generators.”
“People do travel”
“People do travel, they travel with families with kids from the destinations that are less safe to destinations that are more safe: in the Carpathian mountains, western central Ukraine. This is something that keeps us our mental health being alright and being ok.”
The agency is unable to recommend travel to Ukraine to foreign visitors yet, due to logistics and insurance concerns. Still, amid plans by Ryanair to recommence flights to Ukraine’s most popular destinations of Kyiv, Lviv, and Odessa within six weeks of a ceasefure, Oleskiv promised tourism could begin “as soon as the flights are renewed and we can talk about complete safety in certain regions”.
