Before visiting Kyiv in early February, Georg Kapus, director for Austrian National Tourist Office, went online to find some information about tourism in the Ukrainian Carpathians. He was shocked at how hard it was.
“Try to find any information about it, you’ll be very disappointed,” he says.
Kapus could not find a single website that would contain all the information a tourist might require, laid out in a clear and attractive way. He says many tourists would be turned down right away.
“Imagine that I’m Austrian who wants to go to Crimea for a summer vacation. And there is no place where I can find sufficient information about Crimea. I have money, I can’t spend it in Ukraine. That’s a problem,” Kapus says.
Kapus’s function is to promote Austria as a tourism destination. The country of 8.5 million people receives more than 20 million tourists annually. The sector makes up for close to 10 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Kapus believes that Ukraine’s tourism lacks both promotion and systematically-made investments. As a result, out of nearly 23 million foreign citizens, who visited Ukraine in 2012, only 940,000 declared tourism as their purpose of visit.
“Tourism works as a system. If you start improving just one part of it, the result won’t be very good,” he says. “Also, tourism works bottom-up, while in Ukraine they try to make it work [the other way round]”.
To illustrate the “bottom-up” principle, Kapus says that a lion’s share of the 140 million euros budget his office receives, comes from areas attractive for tourists.
According to Kapus, one of the big steps to make bottom-up tourism system work is a tax policy that will leave a fair amount of the taxes in the regions, which will help local resorts to prosper.
Apart from investment, Ukraine needs to focus on improving service in the sector, says Gregor Postl, Head of trade department of the Austrian Embassy in Ukraine.
The rudeness that often comes with an ordered meal is one aspect, and the language barrier in the service sector is another.
Postl, who has spent eight years in Ukraine, has an impressive portfolio of bad service stories to share. He says the problem is not just waiters in Kyiv not speaking English, he says even speaking Russian often does not help to get served.
“I had a case once, when I tried to get water in one of the restaurants in Kyiv. I spoke Russian, and the waitress literally ran away when she heard my accent. She brought her colleague, who also failed to take my order,” he remembers, smiling.
But the smile goes away as Postl starts to reflect on how Ukrainians fail to pay attention to this common problem, from which many people suffer. He says Ukrainians should start complaining to see improvements.
“In Austria I’d go to the manager and the rude worker would have a good chance to lose his position,” Postl says.
He says that the problem goes back to a lack of specialized education. And this is an area where the Austrians could help, should Ukraine choose to start investing into its tourism and service.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].
