The New York Times has an interesting article on tourism to the Black Sea holiday resort town of Batumi in the Republic of Georgia. According to the article, over 300,000 tourists are likely to visit this part of Armenia’s northern neighbor in 2006. However, the growing popularity of Batumi for vacations has come at a cost.

Marina Gahukidze checked into the Meskheti, a hotel in this faded resort town, in 1993, and never left. She and her husband have raised three children in a 10th-floor room with a balcony and a view of the beach.

[…]

The hotel overlooks a gray pebble beach on the Black Sea and rolling green hills, a picturesque scene that resembles Northern California. It is a subtropical town with velvety springs and mild winters. It’s just that the hotel is occupied by refugees, not tourists.

But the summer of 2006 will be the Gahukidze family’s last in the region of Ajaria, a ribbon of coastal land that includes Batumi and was wrenched two years ago from a renegade, separatist leader, Aslan Abashidze. The family is finally moving out, as this former resort town and oil port built by French architects in the 19th century embarks on a crash development program to bring back the tourists.

[…]

The refugees in Batumi come from a still-unresolved conflict in Abkhazia, the other resort district — and therein lies the secret of the money now pouring into Batumi, and the effort to move Ms. Gahukidze from her room.

Georgian officials hope to use Batumi to demonstrate to the other breakaway regions the potential rewards that follow when a separatist region becomes part of a recognized state.

The city, they say, is becoming a showcase of how quickly one of the so-called “frozen conflicts” of the former Soviet Union — Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been fought over by Armenia and Azerbaijan; Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia; and Transnistria in Moldova — can thaw out.

[…]

In the largest investment to date, the TuranAlem bank of Kazakhstan bought 21 hotels — including the Meskheti, where Ms. Gahukidze lives. As part of the investment, the bank will pay each family $7,000 to move out, enough for a modest apartment in an outlying district.

When the refugees are gone, the Kazakh investors will raze and rebuild some hotels and refurbish others. The hotels are now home to 1,912 families, or about 6,000 people. So far, 1,400 people have moved out.

Interestingly, Batumi and other resort towns are attracting more and more tourists from Armenia as well. Ironically, not only is the tourism infrastructure — including accomodation, customer service and nightlife — apparently better than in Armenia, it is also cheaper for Armenians to travel and vacation in Batumi than in Sevan. RFE/RL had a news item on this recent influx last year.

Saakashvili welcomed last week the influx of holidaymakers from Armenia, similarly attributing it to his crackdown on police corruption. Speaking to Armenian journalists in the Ajarian capital Batumi, he said he hopes their number will grow tenfold next year. “We should also develop links to organize visits to both countries, so that people who go to Armenia also come to Georgia and vice versa,” he said. “There should be no border obstacles.”

Personally I think that tourism to Armenia is being mishandled, but that’s another post for a later date. However, I will say that the fixation with central Yerevan at the expense of the regions of Armenia will create problems in the future. There is still no real tourism infrastructure outside of part of the Armenian capital, and although there is some growth in internal tourism to Sevan, Jermuk and Tsaghadzor it is nothing on the scale of what seems to be happening in Georgia.

Moreover, every Armenian I spoke to who spent their holidays in Batumi and Kobuleti last year came back totally impressed and more specifically, disappointed with what was available to them in Armenia.