Visa-free travel dealt a serious blow to Lviv
The visa-free regime between Ukraine and the EU has collapsed the flow of tourists in Lviv. Over the past year, the city was visited by half a million fewer vacationers than in 2017. Lviv tour guide, head of one of the local travel companies Igor Lillo said this on air on the Zakhid.net channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to him, tourists from other regions of Ukraine who visited Lviv now choose European cities, where vacations cost the same.
“If we talk about the reason for the market subsidence, why it sank - there is a subsidence, it is very sensitive, but in one segment, as for the Ukrainian tourist. That is, those who traditionally came to us from the east of Ukraine.
This is due to several factors. But, first of all, the one called visa-free regime. If before the introduction of visa-free travel for the majority of Ukrainians, Lviv was their own Europe, where you could simply go without having an alternative, or when this alternative was complicated, then with the beginning of visa-free travel, people said: “Okay, it’s here, at home – it can wait.”
And with their last money, impoverished Ukrainians decided to visit Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rome, and discover the whole of Europe...
It is no secret that many of the services they receive in Western Europe, they receive, I cannot say much cheaper, but at least for the same price. For example, the cost of a hotel in Lviv today is equal to Krakow. We are only 10% behind the Prague price,” Lillo said.
Also, according to his information, there has been a decline in tourist flow from Eastern European countries. The reason for this is the hours-long queues of Ukrainian guest workers at the Ukrainian-Polish border: “The visa-free situation has led to a catastrophic situation, and this is also the reason for the drop in the number, for example, of Poles coming to us - the borders are blocked by buses that bring people to work. Standing at the border for six hours will not inspire anyone. There is nothing in Lviv that a Western tourist would endure standing for six hours, while it has open borders within the European Union.”
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