What Visiting Football Fans Can Expect From Kyiv

25 May 2018 12:40

On Saturday May 26, around 100,000 international football fans are expected to descend on the Ukrainian capital for the UEFA Champions League final between UK team Liverpool FC and Spain’s Real Madrid.

The match will take place at Kyiv’s Olympiyskiy Stadium, home to the local Dynamo Kyiv team.

This is not the first time Ukraine has held a sporting event of this magnitude, having co-hosted the 2012 European Championships with Poland. Nonetheless, there have been concerns over Kyiv’s ability to host the event.

Earlier this month, reports in the media of wide-scale hotel profiteering in the Ukrainian capital angered the international footballing community. Hotel owners were cancelling pre-booked reservations to make way for new reservations at extortionately higher prices.

The CBRE analytical agency in Ukraine even reported that the cost of a Kyiv hotel room has grown to 30-45 times the regular price in the run up to the match.

Many Kyivans, seeing this as an opportunity to both help out fellow fans and earn a bit of extra money, began advertising spare rooms online for much more reasonable prices, or, in some cases, for free.

As one such local football fan and apartment owner Yevhen Schelunkov told Hromadske: “Personally, if Dynamo Kyiv were to be playing in the Champions League final, I’d sleep on the streets if I had to. But if they want an apartment, that’s no problem. Real, die-hard fans of Liverpool travel around, they’re my soulmates in a way, as I myself have traveled over 100 times [to support my team].”

Accommodation may not be the only problem facing guests to the city. Travel sites often warn that Kyiv is not always the easiest city for English-speakers to get acquainted with – taxi drivers are known to inflate prices, airport workers have limited or no knowledge of English, and the Kyiv metro’s archaic token system often leaves visitors confused.

Hromadske journalist Ostap Yarysh went undercover as a British football fan seeking accommodation, to find out what kind of hospitality visiting sports fans can expect in the Ukrainian capital and whether there is any truth behind the popular myths clouding the Ukrainian tourism industry’s reputation.