Welcome to Mazanka Hotel

A tourism Web site recently posted this joke: a foreign tourist decides to spend the summer in a Ukrainian village. He visits his future vacation spot and asks the cottage owner: “Do you grow tomatoes?” “No,” replies the man. “What about cucumbers?” The man shakes his head. “Maybe you aren’t planting them the right way?” The man is dumbfounded: “You mean we have to plant them?”

This sad joke contains a large grain of truth. People from neighboring and distant countries are more than eager to sample Ukrainian products, in this case tourism. The problem is that people are only starting to figure out where and how to do it. Ukraine’s neighbors have already found their bearings. European tourist operators have said time and again that tourists are tired of seaside beaches, seafood restaurants, and the attendant hustle and bustle; the same complaints are heard about fashionable winter resorts. An opportunity to leave a dusty megalopolis for an almost virgin environment, a village with livestock tucked away in a colorful foreign province, where you can give folk crafts a try, sounds great. People in Europe are willing to pay for this, which is why rural tourism is so highly rated. Countries with scenic and ecologically safe rural areas have not passed up this opportunity to replenish their state budgets and create jobs. In Poland, for example, rural dwellers are encouraged to start tourist businesses. The government exempts them from the law regulating entrepreneurship. In other words, they don’t have to pay any VAT. In Hungary, owners of homesteads catering to tourists are exempt from all taxes. This country now occupies an important niche in the rural tourist market after just a few years.

Ukraine has potential, although no one can translate it into concrete figures. Volodymyr Vasyliev, head of the Union for Assistance to Rural Green Tourism, says that 7 years ago the Institute of Economy estimated rural housing at 6.4 million structures. Approximately 1/6 (even 1/7) of them can access the market. Assuming that every homestead can accommodate roughly 2-3 tourists, the resulting figures illustrate Ukraine’s rural tourism potential.

So far it is no go. Still, some people go to the countryside for their vacations, meaning that other people are providing accommodations. True, there are no official records on this. Sometimes regional state administrations brag about their achievements. But should all those mini-hotels functioning in certain regional centers around the year be considered rural tourism? This type of tourism, in addition to providing direct contact with nature, implies specific kinds of recreation: fishing, horseback riding, mowing hay, even making moonshine.

In this legal vacuum everyone operates as they see fit. Needless to say, tourists often find such accommodations unsatisfactory. Yet, a rural homestead doesn’t have to match a four-star hotel. For example, in Poland every homestead must have a bathroom, electricity, heating, and the guest room must be at least 3m 2 . Before paying for fresh bed linens and meals, a tourist is within his right to ask the owner to see his book of sanitary regulations. And this is far from a complete list of conditions.

Volodymyr Vasyliev says that such accommodation requirements governing rural tourism exist only in the form of a draft law, and they are likely to be less demanding than in Poland. Otherwise, people in the countryside won’t be interested in developing tourism. His own observations indicate that even now Ukrainians are reluctant to play host to foreigners. They aren’t attracted even by the prospect of extra income. “Today the taxation policy in the sphere of rural tourism is determined by local authorities. In some regions they demand bribes for every tourist,” says the head of the union. This season rural tourism may come to an abrupt halt. If the law were followed to a T, namely the 2005 budget, every village granny welcoming a tourist automatically becomes a taxpayer, meaning that she must have an accountant and a cash register.

Not surprisingly, there isn’t a great demand to engage in tourism. According to Volodymyr Tsaruk, director of the Tourist Information Center, rural tourism doesn’t have a marketing strategy. There is none even in places where this kind of tourism is relatively advanced: in Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia, and Khmelnytsky oblasts, and in the Crimea. “Today even tourist operators have only a vague idea about rural tourism. Despite various grants from development funds, homestead owners don’t know how to sell their product or how to deal with tourist operators,” says Volodymyr Tsaruk. This year the Tourist Administration was planning to help rural tourism by placing addresses and photos of some homesteads on a special Web site, but then it was decided to reduce the tourist budget by six times.

Tourist agents are convinced that rural tourism won’t get off the ground without help from the state in the form of laws and capital investments. For example, an ostrich farm has been operating for the past 5 years in Yasnohorodka, a village in the vicinity of Kyiv. Its manager Mykola Fedorenko says that the original idea was to breed the huge birds for their exceptionally healthy meat and soft feathers. The farm was later listed in a tourist guide and now the business has a children’s playground, restaurant, a miniature zoo, and a souvenir shop. Visitors can ride horses and donkeys. Tourists are brought in by bus and they leave with souvenirs: ostrich feathers and leather trinkets. There are only a couple of rooms on the premises, so long stays are out of the question. The farm can’t afford to build a hotel, just as the residents of Yasnohorodka can’t afford to renovate their homes to accommodate tourists, let alone fix the road so drivers won’t have to replace their tires after a single ride. “Without help from the bureaucrats in charge of tourism, without a clearly formulated policy, without laws and advertising, any talk of developing rural tourism is ridiculous,” says Mykola Fedorenko.

The State Tourist Administration (STA) recently received a letter from the Ministry of Finance. Signed by a ministry official, it was a reply to the STA’s request to hold a European congress on rural tourism in Ukraine. The letter read that the congress had made the decision without the Ukrainian government’s knowledge and consent. Therefore, the congress would have to finance the project itself. No comment.