This winter season, videos of disgruntled vacationers at mountain resorts has traditionally circulated. No electricity, water shortages, and kilometer-long traffic jams are the problems winter resorts are facing this year as always, but the current situation in the country also hampers their work.
In a conversation with Commersant the manager at the Hills Hotel in Didveli says that insufficient infrastructure is the mainly cause for chronic traffic jams; there are almost no sidewalks in Bakuriani, which makes it difficult for cleaning equipment to move. There are also problems with salting roads, which puts vacationers at risk. Natia Lezhava notes that this year Bakuriani met the tourist season especially unprepared.
Firstly, the roads are not salted. They say it's because there is biathlon. I don't understand what this has to do with us, Didveli is on the other side, and the championship doesn't start until February. The situation on the road is very bad, due to frozen roads, children are getting injured. There is probably no resource to provide salt spreaders.
The resort is cleaned around the clock, they react to everything, but since there is no parking space, the path to the trash cans is blocked and the cleaning services cannot work. All this creates a problem. We claim to be a tourist zone, and if a tourist sees all this, then it is bad," says Lezhava and adds that the majority of vacationers at "Hills" are Georgians.
"We have no problem with booking, the load is high. There was no snow in Gudauri and everyone went to Bakuriani. Demand was especially high on New Year's Eve , there were hourly traffic jams. Bakuriani was not ready for such a load. We accept guests mainly from Booking. com, 80% are mainly locals," Hills Hotel Director Natia Lezhava points out.
