Tourism: what the sector was, and what a recovery would require

Ukraine received several million foreign visitors a year before 2022, and the number substantially overstates the tourism sector because a large share were arriving for business, family or transit reasons rather than as tourists.

That gap between arrivals and actual tourism is the sector's whole story. The assets are genuinely competitive; almost nothing was ever built around them.

What is actually here

The Carpathians are the strongest single proposition — a mountain range with skiing in winter, hiking and cycling in summer, wooden church architecture that is on the UNESCO list, and a living craft and food culture in the villages. Comparable ranges in Slovakia, Romania and Poland carry several times the visitor volume on less interesting terrain.

Lviv is a complete Central European historic centre, largely undamaged by the war of 1939 to 1945, with a coffee house culture and a restaurant scene that has become genuinely good.

Kyiv has the Lavra, Saint Sophia, the river, and a nightlife and dining sector that punches above the city's income level.

Odesa and the Black Sea coast served a domestic and regional beach market, with the city itself as a distinct architectural proposition.

And the folk tradition — embroidery, ceramics, the ritual calendar, the open-air museums — is among the most complete surviving in Europe and is almost entirely unmarketed to foreign visitors.

Why it underperformed

Four reasons, none of them about the product.

Air connectivity. Route development was late and thin outside Kyiv. Low-cost carriers only reached the regional airports after 2012, and several routes had barely established themselves before they were suspended.

Accommodation. Outside Kyiv and Lviv, mid-market hotel stock was thin and inconsistent. The gap between a hostel and a five-star hotel was largely unfilled, and that gap is precisely where European leisure tourism sits.

Marketing. There was no sustained national tourism promotion. The country never told a story about itself to a foreign audience, which meant it had no position in the market other than the one supplied by news coverage.

And visas, until 2017, which suppressed inbound flows from exactly the markets that would have been most valuable.

What a recovery requires

Assuming a security position that permits it, four things in order.

Air access first. Everything else depends on it, and route development takes eighteen months to two years from decision to first flight.

Then accommodation in the three-star to four-star band, particularly in the Carpathians and along the coast. This is where the financing gap is, and it is exactly the sort of project the development finance institutions are structured to support.

Then a national tourism organisation with a budget and a mandate. Every successful European tourism recovery has had one.

And finally product development around the assets that already exist — the ritual calendar, the crafts, the food, the wooden architecture — packaged in a form a foreign visitor can actually buy.

The honest assessment

Tourism will not be an early part of Ukraine's economic recovery, and any planning that treats it as a quick win is mistaken. Visitor confidence follows security by years, not months, and insurance and airline decisions lag it further.

But it is a real medium-term asset, it is labour-intensive in exactly the regions with the weakest alternative employment, and it requires less capital per job created than almost any other sector. That combination is worth a serious plan, and the country has never had one.

Related in this archive

• Andriyivskyy Descent and the old upper town: reading a city from one street
• Kyiv for the visiting professional: districts, distances and what is worth the time
• Kyiv's traffic and the transport economics behind it
• Ukraine Annual Review 2010: recovery on two channels

The gap between the assets being real and the sector underperforming is usually logistics: beauty you cannot reach is scenery rather than tourism. The first time I went to the Carpathians the road took half the trip. What a recovery requires is access rather than promotion — the same rule as in my own trade.