Turismens utveckling i ett instabilt Kiev : En studie om destinationsimage i Ukraina

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis was to get an idea of how tourism in Ukraine and specifically in the capital, Kiev, changed since the major events in recent years. In 2012 Ukraine and Poland welcomed the big football event Euro 2012 where Kiev was one of the hosting cities. After that the tourist flow increased until the terrible riot that took place at the end of 2013. Among other consequences, it led to Kiev receiving a bad image internationally via mass media, which in turn led to the reduction of the tourist flow. This thesis is a qualitative study, based on interviews with two government officials who had given us an overview of how tourism is today and what government does to improve the city’s image of having poor security and threats to potential tourists in Kiev today. Interviews with both representatives took place on location in Kiev. In addition to that, we conducted an email-survey with 13 Swedish tourists who had not previously visited Kiev to get a picture of their knowledge of Ukraine’s capital. Based on the answers from our respondents, we had worked to obtain the relevant theories and previous research for further analysis. The results of this thesis show that nowadays tourism in Kiev is not a profitable industry and there is too little focus dedicated to this topic as well as the city's marketing, because of the ongoing war in parts of the country. Furthermore, there is no ministry responsible for tourism in Kiev, but only departments that are being constantly moved between different ministries.