“We are waiting! We have very high expectations after Anapa was closed,” residents of seaside villages are full of hope on the eve of the holiday season. The May holidays have always served as a kind of indicator by which Crimeans predicted their summer income. A month ago, there was no certainty that tourists would risk going to the polluted sea in May. Suddenly, Rospotrebnadzor intervened in the process. The head of the agency, Anna Popova, officially stated that the beaches of Anapa and Temryuk were not suitable for recreation, but there were no problems with the Crimean beaches, so it was safe to go.

“At the beginning of April, I was still thinking about whether to open for May or not - there were bookings, but not so many. And I had to hire people, transport furniture from the warehouse, equipment. But as soon as the authorities announced that the beaches in Anapa were unusable, in just a few days I had no rooms left for the beginning of May,” says the owner of a hotel in Sudak.

Russian propaganda channels have already stated that nine and a half million tourists will come to Crimea this summer, the same number as the number of tourists who allegedly visited in 2021, a record year for the occupation. Television broadcasters are intensively stirring up public opinion with news that “Russians are storming train station ticket offices to travel to Crimea.” Crimean hoteliers seem to understand that there can be no queues at the ticket offices, as tickets are sold mainly through electronic services, but they are happy about the efforts of propagandists: the excitement, albeit artificial, will definitely affect the number of vacationers.

At the same time, Crimeans admit that fuel oil from the seabed off the coast has not disappeared. “A few days ago we had a storm, and now it has passed along the coast. In two places, it washed up the corpses of birds in fuel oil and a dead baby dolphin. There are also pieces of fuel oil stuck in the algae,” says a resident of the village of Chornomorske in western Crimea. In the east of the peninsula, at Cape Meganom, a Russian blogger filmed half-palm-sized fuel oil clots in the sand on April 24. However, the authorities have already begun to punish such footage: in Alushta, another Russian who filmed fuel oil on the beach was fined 15 thousand rubles.

“There is a problem, but not as bad as in winter, when the whole beach was covered in stains. Now they clean up the emissions quite quickly. If this continues in the summer and if more fuel does not start to rise, it will not affect Russians much. They are no strangers to mud. Now, at least, they are more interested in the situation with shelling than fuel oil when booking,” says one of the residents of Livadia.
In his opinion, Ukrainian drone attacks are more likely to have a significant impact on the tourist flow than Russian fuel oil. When a train on the Kerch bridge or the Feodosia oil depot burned, Russians returned their tickets en masse and fled from hotels they had already paid for.  

“In the Russian mass consciousness, a vacation in Crimea has recently become a sign of coolness and fearlessness. Especially if you traveled through the newly occupied territories, not across the bridge. The bulk of the tourist flow to the peninsula is made up of low-income Russians, for whom this status is of some importance. But analyzing the situation, anticipating risks and avoiding them is not their strong point,” an employee of a travel agency in Simferopol diplomatically assesses the mental abilities of his clients.

Experts also note another point that can greatly reduce the number of potential vacationers. After the closure of Anapa's beaches, Crimean hoteliers sharply increased prices for accommodation in their establishments.

“I looked at the price tag for the May holidays - it is simply inadequate. In Yalta Intourist, for example, it's a thousand dollars for three days! How many people, I wonder, saw this price and immediately went to look for vacation packages to Turkey,” one of the residents of Sevastopol is indignant.

According to travel industry experts, the rise in prices has already reached a critical level, and today the situation is literally one step away from the point where some tourists will start thinking about finding more reasonable summer vacation options in Georgia, Turkey and Montenegro.
“Today, the price ratio is approximately equal. The service is higher than in Crimea and there are no high risks. So far, demand has been maintained only because of the apparent reluctance of many vacationers to bother with mobile communications, currency exchange and the language barrier. But this is likely to stop holding them back if the cost of a vacation is one and a half to two times higher,” says an employee of a travel agency in Simferopol.

Crimean hoteliers justify the price increase not by a desire to make as much money as possible by taking advantage of the excitement, but by basic economic calculations. “Maybe it's cheaper somewhere in Batumi, who can argue. Maybe their utility bills have not been raised by 25 percent since the summer. Maybe they don't have to promise staff salaries twice as high as last year, because inflation is just crazy. Maybe they don't ask to “track” them at the rate of one million per month during the summer. I would probably keep the price lower without all this,” explains the owner of a mini-hotel in the suburbs of Alushta. And he reminds us that for most residents of the coast, the holiday season is the only chance to make money and last until next summer.