Guiding Lines: Minus 2-Star Service

The city is like a market stall trader, who sells goods that have suddenly become scarce: if you need them, buy them and don’t bargain, if you’re not happy with the price we will find someone who will buy it. Real estate advertising is everywhere: in the streets, on buildings, even on the boarding pass of your plane. Sochi airport is an absolutely different subject. It consists of several parts that look like commercial kiosks from the beginning of the 1990s. Instead of an electronic board with flight details there is a tired looking woman at an information desk.

In Sochi you get the impression that you have gone back to the USSR. Only people who do yoga (with their detachment from the world’s problems) or Russians and former USSR citizens) who can reach the same state as those who do yoga through the consumption of alcohol) are capable of having a good holiday in Sochi.

But it is possible to have a good holiday in Sochi if you spend a lot of money. In the Azure there are rooms for 30,000 rubles a night, at prestigious restaurants before taking an order a deposit of 15,000 rubles will be taken from you and concierge and waiters in hotels look at clients tiredly and only quicken when they work out how to take more money from you. But the rudest of all are taxi drivers. Taxi drivers in Sochi will not be ashamed to charge you double for being stuck in a traffic jam. The explanation: we will spend 10 minutes taking you, but an hour getting back from we came from. They refuse to wait this hour for clients. In general, to bargain and declare the right to receive an adequate service for your money is not acceptable – it won’t lead to anything but frayed nerves. And its not only taxi drivers that are rude. The position of the whole local sphere of services is the same: agree to our conditions, or leave. Their motto is "we don’t owe you anything; you came here, so you give us money." And this is all despite high competition (or maybe because of it?). One well known developer joked that the people from Sochi have a spirit: "we don’t have any money, we don’t want to work, and every day is a holiday."

By 2014 the city administration promises that the income of everyone living in Sochi will increase three times and this is one of the strategic goals of the development of the future Olympic city. The local authorities have managed to beat out of the national and regional budgets a further 22 billion rubles (in addition to the previously specified 313.9 billion rubles) especially for the development of infrastructure in the resort city. That the city was close to death was clear long before the announcement of the International Olympic Committee. Water and electricity faults in Sochi are a normal phenomenon. For example, the day I arrived and settled into the Sochi-Breeze hotel, there was no hot water in my room and on the day of my departure there was no power to the lights. Because of thunder storms and heavy rain power transmission lines break – all five pass through the mountains. In general, not just modernization and reconstruction is needed, but the creation of new engineering systems is necessary.

The central beach in Sochi is for people with strong minds and bodies. Locals don’t swim. There are almost no sun beds, but commercial advertising posts for apartment buildings and cottage settlements are put right into the pebbles of the beach. The central quay, the main attraction of the city, is also filled with such advertising. Cafes are either empty or closed (because of competition). On the main part of the quay it is practically lined with restaurants and cafes. Next to that are several residential complexes under construction and also a few abandoned buildings which have not been fully constructed as the developer has started to build but not gained all the approvals. The whole city is a huge construction site. Buildings under construction and cranes cover the beautiful skyline of Sochi.

Everyone who can is in a rush to make money from local ground. Land can survive anything. But in destroying the nature and unique climate of Sochi, it is possible to lose much more than you can achieve. Money in fact will not replace either the clean sea, or the green forests.

The authorities want to increase the tourist stream in Sochi by several times by 2014. But once the powerful stimulus of the Olympics will disappear, the same simple service will remain. The mentality of people from Sochi is unlikely to change even with the destruction of the Black sea and the loss of the city of its status as a resort.