BUDAPEST, Hungary — There’s a lot that Kyiv can learn from Budapest in terms of tourism, and even with the current political tensions between Ukraine and Hungary, there’s no reason why the Ukrainian capital shouldn’t look to its Hungarian counterpart for fresh ideas.
The two cities are about 1,000 kilometers apart by car, less than two hours by plane, and also connected by a waterway system: from Kyiv along the Dnipro River down to the Black Sea and westward by the lengthy Danube River.
There are some stark similarities between the two cities: both are located on hilly terrain next to a large river, both are ancestors of ancient kingdoms that were established at a similar time – the Kyivan Rus in the ninth century and the Kingdom of Hungary in the late 10th century.
Both cities have similar symbols too: Budapest has the Freedom Statue overlooking the city, while Kyiv has the Soviet-inherited Motherland Monument, Budapest has Saint Gellert baptizing the city into Christianity, while Kyiv has Volodymyr the Great. According to historical accounts, both cities were ravaged by the Mongol invasion of the 1240s, and both countries have similar cuisine – Kyivans have borscht, while Budapestians have goulash. Both cities are proud of their funicular railways, and inherited a rich Jewish culture.
Tourism
But there is one main difference that stands out: Budapest is flourishing with tourists, and has plenty of dining options with Thai, Chinese, French, Italian, and Mediterranean cuisine, multiple attractions, and a good presence of international restaurant and hotel brands. Kyiv lacks all of this.
I was talking with an American acquaintance I met at a ruins bar – a bar located in an abandoned building – and I said that he should visit Kyiv, since it’s similar but much cheaper – and also more Eastern European. But the prospect of more Eastern European didn’t seem attractive to him: “Yeah, I’m not sure about that,” he replied.
While I was sad for this young American losing out on discovering Kyiv, he had a good point: Kyiv needs to do a better job of promoting itself, since what people do know about the country is often negative. Budapest’s slogan is the “Spice of Europe” or the “Paris of the East.” What’s Kyiv’s?
For many Westerners (especially Americans), Budapest is Eastern Europe. However, even though it was part of the Soviet-dominated Communist Bloc, it is actually part of Central Europe. Budapest is also predominantly Catholic rather than Eastern Orthodox, which inevitably had an effect on the country’s outlook, politics and economy.
Major developments
Since 2017, Budapest’s hotel market has been experiencing strong growth, both in terms of investment and development, according to Colliers International, a Toronto-based real estate agency.
Air travel has also been seeing strong growth too. In 2017, the total number of passengers exceeded 13 million, 15 percent growth compared to the previous year, and new direct flights are connecting Hungary’s capital to China, the Middle East, and the United States, the agency reports.
Of those visiting, most tourists (the total registered guest nights in 2017 was 8.9 million), making up around two thirds of visitors, were from the U.K., U.S., Germany and Italy.
In contrast, Kyiv attracted a meager 1.6 million foreign tourists in 2017, mostly from Belarus, Israel and the U.S., even though Kyiv’s population is roughly twice as large as that of Budapest.
The main reason? Budapest knows how to market itself while Kyiv is still learning.
According to the Budapest Business Journal, the city’s promotion campaign, in which it dubs itself the “Spice of Europe,” has spent at least $4.8 million dollars for advertising on CNN, reaching an audience of around 250 million viewers.
And in 2016 the total contribution of the tourism sector to Hungary’s gross domestic product was $13 billion, or ten percent of overall gross domestic product, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.
Some differences
There are of course other differences too. Budapest is part of the European Union while Kyiv is not, Budapest is surrounded by a cluster of tourist cities (Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Zagreb and Wroclaw) while Kyiv is not. Budapest was once co-capital of the wealthy Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century. And Budapest has a functioning rule of law system, while Kyiv does not.
But that is still no reason why Kyiv couldn’t be as an attractive tourist destination as Budapest.
Like any city, Budapest has problems and some of them are similar to those of Kyiv. It is battling its own brain drain of professionals, the two cities’ countries are still relatively poor compared to their western neighbors, and are under the influence of Russian-friendly oligarchs.
Kyiv’s nonexistent leisure
But whenever I chat with Kyiv hotel managers, they all complain that the leisure segment is stagnant and that they need to stimulate it themselves by organizing conferences and hosting people on business trips. All have visions of how Kyiv could be a tourist country, but say that the local infrastructure isn’t competitive enough. Just as one example, for an EU resident, flights to Kyiv are much more expensive than to Budapest or other central European cities.
But Budapest wasn’t always a tourist destination. In fact, it became so quite recently — about 10-15 years ago according to locals. Since 2007, the Budapest’s hotel market demand has doubled, with almost 5 million guests registered in hotels, according to Colliers International.
The city started to create incentives for locals and foreigners to pour money into its tourism sector. And there are concrete results. Budapest has topped the charts of the most investment attractive Central and Eastern European cities for a number of years now. For example, in 2014, the city was named by the Financial Times Group’s fDi Magazine as the most attractive Central and Eastern European city for foreign direct investment in 2014.
And the Hungarian government has liberalized the sector by cutting the value-added rate for restaurant services, as well as upgrading its national tourism strategy, which is to focus more on high-end quality tourism services.
New possibilities
Budapest has many old historical buildings that it’s now renovating. Kyiv is in a somewhat different situation, as most of its historical buildings were totally destroyed during World War II, and then replaced with cheap and gloomy Soviet architecture. But that shouldn’t stop Kyivans. Instead of seeing it as an obstacle, the city could use it to its own advantage: it has the design know-how to start replacing old ramshackle downtown buildings with ones based on sketches of the architectural beauties that used to stand in their place.
An as an ancient city, Kyiv should also take advantage of its numerous archeological sites. For example, instead of fighting to build a mall in a location where there are remains of wooden buildings from the 11th-13th century streets on Poshtova Ploshcha – one of Kyiv’s most historical sites – it makes a lot more (including financial) sense for the city to promote its ancient past and advertise it abroad as much as possible.
I remember an art activist telling me how he would like to start a project in Ukraine that would collect all of the statues of Soviet ruler Vladimir Lenin and place them in one spot, making an open-air museum instead of simply destroying them. Budapest actually did it, with its Memento Park open-air museum.
Kyiv beats Budapest?
In some ways, I actually find Kyiv better than Budapest. I find the people more hospitable, and the ethnic food and craft beer tastier and cheaper.
Kyiv should promote its image abroad a lot more proactively, as Budapest has done. But first, it needs to do some homework.
Kyiv should find up to five things that it can sell and heavily promote. For example, Budapest has been selling its historic baths, its goulash soup and paprika, its Danube River waterway, ruin bars, architectural sites, and its vibrant film industry. All of this can be found in CNN’s promotion of the city.
Competing with Budapest
But since Kyiv doesn’t have its own “baths,” it could easily create something similar. Many of Budapest’s baths were built with thermal baths, spas, and swimming pools simply as extensions in the past decades. Budapest is taking advantage of its river walks with beautiful hotel views, topnotch cruise ships, while Kyiv isn’t. Budapest has at least four pedestrian bridges – Kyiv should build more.
Kyiv should also up its infrastructure standards, walks for pedestrians and bikers (Budapest is great for walking and riding bikes, whereas Kyiv is congested with cars parked on sidewalks), encourage the arrival of more budget airlines, and expand its fast-train routes. Kyiv has been doing so, but the city has to move more quickly if it wants to catch up with its competitor on the Danube.
And lastly, Kyiv can take advantage of its relative proximity to Budapest, making it more attractive for tourists who visit Budapest to move on to Kyiv. While in Budapest, why not visit Kyiv? It’s closer than Athens, Paris, and London, after all.
