With Santa Claus next door – Kommersant FM
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A resort with spa complexes and an amusement park will be built in the city of Father Frost. The development of the tourism cluster in Veliky Ustyug will be carried out by Cosmos Hotel Group, which belongs to AFK Sistema. It is planned to accommodate vacationers in a hotel and chalet with 200 beds. The territory of the future cluster is 87 hectares. The project, as Vedomosti writes, will cost from 2 billion to 4 billion rubles.
It is possible that this will not be enough, says Andrey Shemyakin, CEO of the consulting company SEA Company. In general, the project, in his opinion, has good prospects:
“In classic hotels, the return on investment ranges from five to seven years. In such complexes they can reach up to 15-20 years. But we must not forget that today it is the hotel facility that is often the catalyst for tourism, and not vice versa. Therefore, if the quality of the resort in Veliky Ustyug is appropriate and attracts wealthy clients, then the idea has the right to live.
At the same time, the project of an average hotel in the city center in the region with 50-70 rooms with two food outlets was previously estimated at 200-500 million rubles. Now it costs about 1 billion rubles just because of the equipment – furniture, plumbing, and so on. But what will happen in a year or two is very difficult to predict.
Perhaps they will first build a hotel, some part of the infrastructure, begin to receive income from it and, at the same time, complete the rest of the complex. Then you can move on to the amusement park, because it is, of course, less profitable and less expensive. In principle, a resort of this kind can be completely built in a maximum of four years.
But it won’t work to change places. After all, just attractions without the opportunity to spend several days in the city are unlikely to attract a sufficient number of tourists.”
The estate of Father Frost, next to which the new tourist cluster will be located, opened back in 1998. Investments in its development during this time amounted to about 7 billion rubles. At the same time, Veliky Ustyug remains attractive only in the winter season, noted Olga Sanaeva, vice-president of the Russian Union of Tourism Industry:
“There’s a great winter payback there. But some effort must be made to make this place of stay year-round. The fact that this is aimed at family tourists is not a bad thing.
At the same time, there really are no good accommodation facilities there now. We even see from the tourists we send there that the premium segment is not represented at all in the city.
Perhaps the most difficult task is to do a high-quality job both with respect to the accommodation facility, the display object, and, most importantly, the services provided. And if Veliky Ustyug achieves this, it is quite obvious that it will be successful.”
Veliky Ustyug is one of the five most popular cities in the country among tourists during the New Year holidays. It accounts for approximately 6.5% of all bookings at the beginning of January, the Association of Tour Operators of Russia reported. This destination mainly attracts family audiences who come to the city by train.
And transport accessibility is one of the main problems of Veliky Ustyug, emphasized Sergei Romashkin, vice-president of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia: “There are single-industry towns, but here there is a monoidea. The city is perceived exclusively in connection with the fabulous Santa Claus. This is his advantage, which allowed him to increase the tourist flow 100 times in 15-20 years.
But this advantage is also a significant limitation. It is difficult for tourists to offer any other idea comparable in scale to the image of Santa Claus.
It seems that the obvious option is still such cooperation, collaboration with other cities. Let’s say Veliky Ustyug-Arkhangelsk-Petrozavodsk-St. Petersburg. On such a route, each city will receive its share of tourist attention.
After all, no one will go to Veliky Ustyug for a week. The problem is that such a vacation still requires air travel. The conversation that there will be an airport in the city that will accommodate at least small aircraft has been going on for probably ten years now.”
In 2022, about 0.5 million people visited the estate of Father Frost. The authorities of the Vologda region expect that by 2030 the flow of tourists to Veliky Ustyug will double.
Everything is clear with us – Telegram channel “Kommersant FM”.
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