Personal Information:

Yanina Gavrilova – Chairman of the Board of the All-Ukrainian Association of Guides, representative of Ukraine in WFTGA, FEG, guide with 25 years of experience in tourism, DVV International trainer, USAID tourism consultant.

Walking around pubs with tourists or treating them to dry Kyiv jam is not a gastro tour. Answering foreigners’ questions about Maidan is not yet dark tourism. To come up with an author’s walk through the courtyards of Podil is not the same as a high-quality sightseeing tour of the city. The head of the All-Ukrainian Association of Guides, Yanina Gavrilova, talks about the most popular and most difficult excursions, self-sufficient Kievans and questions of foreigners.

Tours are presented in Kyiv in almost all languages: Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, Hebrew. This does not mean that the demand is completely satisfied. For example, we recently encountered a situation where we could not quickly find a guide in Lviv who was ready to conduct a tour in Slovak and Czech. We do not fully cover even the demand for excursions in Polish. To date, only the request for English-speaking excursions has been fully satisfied.

It is not so trendy and fashionable for the people of Kiev to attend excursions. The inhabitants of the capital are spoiled, they have many festivals and events. On the tour go with children or visiting guests. The people of Kiev consider themselves self-sufficient and are sure that the guides will not surprise them. Actually it is not. Those who really know the city well and are interested in its history, on the contrary, go on excursions more often.