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Are vacations in the Crimea worth it?

The tourist destination needs a new brand

Photo from the website uakrim.net

The last ten years have seen many renovations of Crimean resorts, but to little avail. The Crimea lags behind other resorts in the Black Sea Region, and attempts to change this have not yielded results. It has failed to acquire proper status, its resorts are of local importance, and the services do not correspond to demand or the prices that are charged for them. Unfortunately, because of this, attractiveness has gone down. In 2009 five million people stayed there, which is 12.4 percent less than in 2008, when 5.7 million guests came. The number of visitors often does not cover 70 percent of capacity. The increase in the number of health resort visitors is explained not by better quality, but the fact that Russia’s resorts in Sochi have turned into a huge construction site. Besides, the recent fires in Russia, which covered vast areas with smoke, caused a new inflow of Russians. Neither of these factors signals anything good for the Crimea: in the future the number of visitors will continue to drop.

On the president’s initiative the Crimea is called “Ukraine’s pearl,” and numerous Crimean experts have voiced the opinion that this expression should be filled with real content. Leading experts believe that the Crimea should be re-branded. How to do this?

They say that one should develop the peninsula as a complex tourism brand, taking into account its real potential and variable demands of visitors, as individual promotion is not that efficient. Crimean residents hope that a law on the Crimea will be drafted, and that a number of programs like the Transport Infrastructure of the Crimea, Crimea’s Water, Crimea’s Ecological Security, will be implemented, which will enable the creation of a modern base for the realization of large-scale investment projects. The recently adopted strategy Crimea is a Territory of Success, designed for the period until 2017, is also closely connected with shaping its image.

In the area surrounding Feodosia, many of this year’s factors have brought the Crimea back to its former “Soviet” state. For example, to rent a one-room apartment with an air conditioner costs 500 hryvnias a day, while last year this service cost 150 hryvnias. There are cases of people renting garages for 200 hryvnias a day. An average apartment costs 200 to 400 hryvnias a day. Water is supplied to the resort’s settlements for three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening. Blackouts are an additional nuisance: during the high season the resorts’ population grows five to ten times, and neither the network nor the transformers are meant for such loads. Russians are mostly outraged by the fact that the locals are robbing them blind. A guest from Tamara complained to Crimean journalists that she had managed to rent a temporary building in the yard of a private house for 50 dollars a day. However, the floor was dirty, the linen of low quality, the tableware were covered with nicks, the pans were black from smoke, forks and spoons were deformed, and the toilet was an outhouse. At the same time there are no toilets whatsoever in the village of Ordzhonikidze [not to be confused with the city of Ordzhonikidze in Dnipropetrovsk oblast], which is considered to be a lively resort. The beaches and recreation sites usually require an entrance fee (and a rather high one at that), but are poorly cleaned and the tourists are served like in Soviet times — based on the “pay and get lost” principle. Unfortunately, this picture is typical of present-day Crimea.

Like in Soviet times, only a small part of health resort visitors, some 15 percent, can afford to stay in medium and high-quality conditions — expensive hotels, health resorts, and boarding houses. The rest, about 80 percent of guests, are so-called unorganized tourists or “savages,” who cannot afford to all the conveniences, but constitute the major part of the Crimea’s profits, and have to withstand mishaps and inconveniences. While the Crimea is trying to resolve the question, whether it should be a resort for poor or rich people, life is bringing its own corrections: in a tourist region both rich clients and those with low incomes should be provided with high-quality services, albeit differing in terms of amount and purpose.

HOW TO MAKE THINGS WORK

Why is the quality of Crimean resorts is not getting better, and does not meet the demands of visitors? There are many reasons behind this, as the head of the Crimean Association of Tourist Agencies Maryna Beresnieva explained. For example, the existing regulations are imperfect and the questions of licensing is defective in regards to excursion activities, the certification and categorization for traveling, the presence of different types of tourist services on the market etc. As a result a large part of the tourist business in the autonomous republic remains in the shadows which has its effect on the correlation between prices and quality of provided services. This also has an effect on the region’s reputation. Whereas our closest competitors, Turkey, Egypt, Bulgaria, are purposefully developing their resorts, the Crimea’s haphazard actions do not give it a leading position in its struggle for clients.

The promotion of Crimean resorts is unsystematic, it does not have any clear structure, or defined priorities. The image of the region in the minds of potential tourists remains unclear, and diffuse. It is impossible to imagine the competitive struggle for tourists and investments without special efforts aimed at developing a strong brand for the region.

The official tourist symbol and slogan of the Crimea “Towards Sunny Hugs” seems to have been created with full conformity to the rules and has existed for over ten years. Do foreign tourists take interest in the Crimea simply because it has beaches? Not so much. Besides, the brand is efficient when it is clearly segmented. Saky is health tourism, whereas Tarkhankut focuses on active tourism, and Rozdolne – rural tourism. The Crimea is unique as different climatic natural zones are present on its territory, there is a mixture of ethnicities and cultures. Every city can have a separate brand, but the overall image, as the biggest matryoshka, should embrace all the peculiarities and versatility of the peninsula.

The development of tourism depends on how the Crimean tourism product is going to be shaped, what content it will have. Thus, the head of the department of marketing, promotion, and public relations of Yalta’s Palmira Palace Hotel Oleh Fesenko believes that the Crimea should focus on medical treatments. The healing qualities of the Crimean nature are indeed unique, but this is not promoted, and potential tourists do not know about it. The visitors should know the Crimea not only as a beach, but also as a health resort. You can see beaches, the sun, the seas all over the world, and many are better than those in the Crimea. Why should such commonplace features be promoted? At the same time our health resorts, and curative factors of the Crimean nature, forest air, mineral water, and medicinal mud, are unique. It is namely for them that visitors are ready to pay an adequate price. Speaking about children’s recreation, Evpatoria has the best potential in entire CIS.

The head of the Crimean Hospitality Association and the group of companies Laspi Olena Bazhenova agrees with this. Speaking with journalists she asserted that in the sphere of recreation spa institutions need the state support the most. The question is about the need for investments in medical equipment and infrastructure, and the preparation of high-qualified personnel. The quality of the experts in the Crimea is quite far from high. The problem concerns not just their qualifications, but also their work schedules: the health resorts do not operate all year long, which is why doctors have to look for permanent jobs in other places.

Ukraine’s “Law on Tourism” lobbies the interests of operators of tourism abroad, which bring the currency out of Ukraine and support other countries’ economies. When this document was adopted, the Crimean representatives were against it. However, nobody listened to them at the time, countering it by “Ukraine’s European aspirations.” If the same support is acquired by the tour operators that bring tourists into the country, not out of it, it will be possible to expect tourism growth.

Georgia is considered an example of competent rebranding in the CIS region. Not only have they repaired the old roads and built new ones, they have held a competent promotion campaign on Western channels. As a result the leading world brands (Hilton, Hyatt etc.) are building hotels there. According to the information provided by the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this sum has already been remade. Within the last six years, the flow of tourists to this country has been multiplied by six, even in spite of the Russian-Georgian conflict.

Thus, the international experience of efficient reform indicates that all promotion campaigns disregarding, if the quality of services in the Crimea is boosted and the prices for them are well-balanced, there will be no positive results. However, the efficiency and attractiveness of the brand will be determined by the real quality of services, not its promotional slogans.

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