Tourist season in Abkhazia: reflections from owners

Marianna Kotova

Sukhum

Tourist season in Abkhazia

Hoteliers and “private owners” talk about tourist season in Abkhazia. More tourists, but more problems.

On the first day of October the swimming season was officially closed in Abkhazia. Buoys and deck chairs have been removed from the beaches, and lifeguards no longer monitor the situation on the water. But the tourist season continues: rooms are being booked in hotels and the private apartments, and guides are recruiting new groups.

Staying in hotels has become more expensive

The recent tourist season in Abkhazia turned out to be very successful for hoteliers. At a small hotel in New Athos there was not a single free room either in August or in September, and even in November all rooms were fully booked.

“This has never happened before in our five years of operation,” Kama, co-owner of the hotel, states.

Tourist season in Abkhazia

This is a positive change, but there is also something that hoteliers don’t care for.

“When our hotel was booked through Booking, the audience was more intelligent. And now that this platform has been blocked [on the territory of the Russian Federation], we have started working with Russian booking sites. Now a rougher audience comes from there, people of a lower cultural level,” Kama says, adding that they even had to kick two guests out who got too drunk and rowdy.

As for prices, in this hotel they have increased by 30% compared to 2021.

“First we raised the price by 15% because of general inflation, and then decided to raise it by another 15% because all others hotels did so. And this is an objective necessity. Everything has become more expensive, and most importantly, gasoline and electricity.”

“Some vacationers are just wild”

Private owners renting rooms in their homes, on the contrary, did not raise prices. In Sukhum, in the Mayak district, it was possible to rent a room for two or even three people for 1,500-2,500 rubles [$25-40] per day.

Nadezhda Chamagua says that she did not raise prices, since their guests are regular customers who return every year.

“Amid the unstable situation in the world and the widespread rise in prices, we decided to leave the prices the same, our gratitude for loyalty. These people have been coming to us for five to ten years.”

Tourist season in Abkhazia

But, according to Nadezhda, she did not notice much demand for holidays in the private sector during this tourist season in Abkhazia. In the second half of the summer of 2020 and in 2021, demand was greater.

“At the beginning of summer, there were even fewer vacationers than usual. Then it seems they began to book, but a little later they began to refuse. The situation in the world is such that some simply did not want to go far from home.”

Another feature of this season which was noticed by private owners was that vacationers were drinking more.

“Some of them were very wild, from morning to night with a bottle. I have never seen anything like this on my previous visits. One even had an attack of delirium tremens. My son and I ran around the yard, caught him. He nearly broke our water heater. He hurt himself, then was sent to the hospital. Probably stress is leading them to overcompensate,” Nadezhda says.

Jeeping instead of excursions

Tour guide Ilona Adleiba did not notice an increase in demand for city sightseeing tours in Sukhum. But, she thinks, this may also be due to lack of advertising.

Ilona thinks that city tours are preferred by a special category of tourists – most often people who themselves are associated with culture, architecture or education.

“I had mostly vacationers from expensive hotels. Their income and education are above average, so the demand for entertainment is different, and an ordinary tourist spends mainly on housing, food and, in extreme cases, on jeeping [an extreme off-road trip]. And this is very disappointing, because we have rich nature and history.”

Tourist season in Abkhazia

First time at sea

Tourists themselves say that this summer their approach to recreation has changed. For example, Evgeny and Irina from St. Petersburg have been vacationing in Abkhazia for eleven years in a row. Only this year have they understood why they come year after year to the same place.

“This year we spent part of our vacation in New Athos, but we could not stay at the hotel for the entire vacation. We moved out a day earlier.

We realized that we come here not only to relax, but to socili. The owners of the house where we stay have become like family to us, we miss not only the sea and the sun, but also them,” Irina shares her discovery.

Tourist season in Abkhazia

"We can do everything" – stories of labor migrants in Abkhazia

Labor migrants in Abkhazia – who are they, where do they come from and why has Abkhazia become a favorable labor migration center for the foreign workers

Tourist season in Abkhazia

And Ivan Vasiliev from Izhevsk came to the sea for the first time. At 37, he realized that he had never in his life spent a vacation by the sea with his wife and children. He and his family chose a hotel in Pitsunda and didn’t regret it.

“Nature, people and life here are fundamentally different from what we are used to, so we managed to completely reboot and clear our heads of daily news,” Ivan says.

According to preliminary data from the Russian Association of Tour Operators (ATOR), in the summer of 2022 800,000 people vacationed Abkhazia, which is almost half as much as last year. But the number of bookings shows that more people will visit the resorts of the republic in autumn than last year.

Toponyms, terminology, views and opinions expressed by the author are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of JAMnews or any employee thereof. JAMnews reserves the right to delete comments it considers to be offensive, inflammatory, threatening or otherwise unacceptable

Tourist season in Abkhazia