Almost 70 percent of the newly established tourism businesses belong to sole proprietors, as announced on August 12 by the State Registration Service (SRS). It said that 1,054 tourism business entities were registered between the beginning of 2013 and August 9 of this year. Nearly one-third of them were incorporated.
The SRS clarified other trends in this market, too. “Most of the newly created and registered tourism businesses are travel agencies. As much as 823 business entities of this kind have been created since the beginning of the year, of which 619 are corporations and 204 are sole proprietors. Second most popular sub-industry is reservation services and related activities, with 90 corporations and 27 sole proprietors. Tour operators have been slightly slower to register, totaling 18 corporations and 96 sole proprietors,” the director of the SRS’s Corporation and Sole Proprietor Registration Department Oleksandr Barbeliuk said as quoted by the agency’s press service.
Therefore, Ukraine’s tourism industry experiences a noticeable recovery. Importantly, experts are of the opinion it will be sustained producing a positive trend. President of the Association of Tourist Industry Leaders of Ukraine Oleksandr Novikovsky is confident that the number of people employed by the industry should become two and a half times higher by 2022, reaching one million. According to him, it will be enabled, among other factors, by the government’s increased attention to the field.
Implementation of the State Tourism Development Program to 2022, now being prepared by the State Tourism and Resorts Service, will help as well. According to Novikovsky, each region will have its own development path promoted by the program. For example, the Crimea, which annually receives six million visitors, is to diversify its services, complementing seaside resorts with mountain tourism. The western Ukraine and eastern industrial areas will get their own programs, too. In addition, the program will include disseminating information about tourist regions and improving tourist safety in Ukraine.
In addition, Novikovsky remarks, the State Tourism and Resorts Service is developing a procedure to determine (via satellite accounts) exact numbers of people who come to Ukraine as tourists, for it is hard to count now how many of the 22-23 million foreigners crossing the borders of Ukraine each year actually come to us as tourists.
