Holiday plans have changed a lot for the family of Oleh Rozvadovsky, 29, a marketing specialist from Kyiv. This year, Rozvadovsky's family and many others are staying in Ukraine rather than traveling abroad because of the hrvynia's plunge in value.
Once accounting for about 70 percent of travelers to Crimea, many patriotic Ukrainians refuse to set foot in the Russian-occupied peninsula.
Rozvadovsky found newer alternatives. He visited the Natural Reserve Askaniya Nova in Kherson Oblast. He also went to Syvash Bay and sandbar Arabat Split near the Azov Sea. He liked them all. His next destinations are little towns in Odesa Oblast and western Ukraine.
Only three percent of Ukrainians can afford holidays abroad, a study by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found in 2014.
During the May holidays, Ukrainian travel agencies sold 20 percent more local trips than the same period last year, according to Volodymyr Tsaruk, head of Tourism Information Center, a non-profit group.
Meanwhile, foreigners have stayed away from Ukraine because of Russia’s war.
An estimated 2 million people visited the Carpathian Mountains and Lviv last year. One of the up-and-coming trends of domestic tourism is food-and-wine tours in Odesa and Zakarpattya.
Lviv remains Ukraine’s tourism headliner. Nearly 150,000 tourists visited it during the May holidays this year, according to the Lviv City Council. Mayor Andriy Sadovyi told the Kyiv Post that 1.7 million tourists visited the western Ukrainian city last year.
Anastasiya Merkhel, a 22-year old native of Mykolayiv, had to buy a train ticket to Lviv three weeks beforehand and to stay at her friends’ place as most Lviv hotels were full.
Odesa is another favorite destination.
Bon Apart hotel in Odesa was fully booked for the May holidays, according to its manager Anastasiya Klymenko. A night in its cheapest room costs Hr 720, yet the hotel is already 25 percent booked for the summer.
Kherson and Mykolayiv oblasts, near the Black Sea, are also being rediscovered as an alternative to Crimea.
Tetyana Volynets, head of the Southern Ukraine Tourism Association, says that the most popular destinations are the National Reserve Askaniya Nova, the port city of Skadovsk in Kherson Oblast and the 90-hectare environmental and ethnographic tourism center Zeleni Khutory Tavriyi (Tavriya Green Bowery).
Volynets said hotel selection is a problem, but some are trying to offer such activities as horseback riding and sailing as well as tours to lighthouses and wineries.
Even in war, people have to relax.
“We all are tired of the war,” said Tsaruk of the Tourism Information Center. “That’s why this year despite economic turmoil the flow of (domestic) tourists is significantly bigger compared to 2014.”
