Skift Take
Bureaucratic hassles, high prices, poor service, crappy food, and unexpected closures: The five bedrock values of Russian tourism.
Visitors to Krasnaya Polyana, a skiing area in southern Russia that will host the Sochi Winter Olympics next year, could be forgiven for feeling like they’ve been stranded in a building site.
While contractors race against time to complete the Olympic facilities, the clang of metal resounds and dust swirls around the muddy terrain as skiers clamber past security barriers to catch a gondola lift operated by Russia’s state-run lender OAO Sberbank at the Gornaya Karusel resort.
Billionaire Vladimir Potanin, who’s spending $2.2 billion on the nearby Rosa Khutor resort, promises that such impressions will be a distant memory when Krasnaya Polyana offers as much as 200 kilometers (120 miles) of connected slopes a few years from now by combining three separate ski zones. That’s one-third the size of France’s Les 3 Vallees, which bills itself as the world’s biggest skiing area.
“It will be complete happiness for tourists,” says Sergei Bachin, Rosa Khutor’s general director. “The skiing we offer is so superior that we have no shortage of tourists already now and there will be even more after the Olympics.”
With Sochi only a two-hour flight from Moscow and on the same time zone, Muscovites can take a w
