The impact of Covid-19 on the tourism activities of Hungarian tourism enterpreneurs in Transcarpathia

Abstract

Following the negative effects of the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine's tourism has once again embarked on a path of development. However, the growth in tourist traffic did not take long, as the Covid-19 pandemic rapidly reached Ukraine and the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out in early 2022. The analysis of the latter’s impact will not be addressed in this research.

In all countries, the pandemic has had an impact on all areas of people's lives, particularly affecting health, economy, education and tourism sectors. Due to the rapid spread of the pandemic, governments had to react quickly to protect their population. As a result, measures were introduced to restrict people's movement and contacts, such as closing airports, country borders, forcing the population to quarantine for weeks or months, to teleworking, distance education, to ban events and close catering facilities. These measures were not implemented smoothly even in countries with a high level of development and a strong economy, and placed a particularly heavy burden on countries with medium or low levels of development, including Ukraine. Given these events, Ukraine was quickly a????ected by one negative impact after the other, one of the main losses being tourism industry and tourism-related companies.

The subject of our study is to explore the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the tourism industry in one of Ukraine’s regions, Transcarpathia. The case study was carried out among tourism companies of the Hungarian minority in Ukraine along the Ukrainian-Hungarian border. In the course of the survey, questionnaires were sent out to 97 entrepreneurs who carried out a total of 167 tourism-related activities. Two issues were addressed in particular: How did the epidemic affect tourism businesses in 2020? How did the companies under study react to the situation, i.e. how did they try to adapt to the unprecedented events?

The investigation showed that the entire lockdown, the various measures that were changing on almost a weekly basis, the uncertainty, completely pushed travelling to the background and made it impossible for tourism businesses to operate. There was not a single entrepreneur in our study who had not suffered losses due to the 2020 epidemic. Due to the epidemic and/or disease control measures, the entrepreneurs’ turnover fell by an average of 70.5% in 2020 compared to the previous year. State aid was minimal to alleviate the damage suffered by entrepreneurs and only 20% of the surveyed enterprises received it. During the entire lockdown period, the majority of entrepreneurs (84%) tried to focus on business development at the expense of their previous savings and tried to keep the people they employed with various success. However, the interviewed Hungarian tourism entrepreneurs have not been able to really benefit from online sales; given the vulnerability of the sector, it is also necessary to develop businesses in an innovative way, in terms of marketing, sales and electrical engineering in the future.