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Belarus State TV Host Highlights Selective Tourism Achievements, Omits Critical Context
The coronavirus epidemic has ended, and borders are open, but the tourist flow from the CIS has not reached the 2019 level.
Belarus has made strides in organized tourism: in 2023, there were nearly four times as many group visits to the country as in 2000, as Mikhail Siniitsyn, a host on the Gomel’s state-run TV and Radio claimed. The Weekly Top Fake team dug deeper and found some nuances.
The number of foreign tourists visiting Belarus has skyrocketed, Siniitsyn said on November 13, 2024, during the ‘Opinion’ program broadcast.
“The latest achievement in the socio-economic development of the Republic of Belarus over 30 years since the establishment of the presidency is related to the development of the tourism and hospitality industry, in our country. The number of foreign citizens visiting Belarus as part of organized tourist groups in 2023 was 3.8 times higher than the tourist flow in 2000,” the host said.
From 2000 to 2023, the number of organized tourists visiting Belarus did increase — from 60,000 to 233,000 people. The host neglected to mention one detail: in 2019, the figure was nearly twice as high as the previous year (405,500). It then collapsed due to the coronavirus epidemic and has not recovered since.
The host also cited other tourism statistics for the previous year:
“As noted by the Ministry of Economics of Belarus, the total number of organized and unorganized tourist trips to our country in 2023 was 5.7 million people.”
Mikhail Siniitsyn did not provide figures for previous years for comparison, making it unclear whether 5.7 million is a lot or a little. For instance, in 2019, almost 12 million tourists visited Belarus.
The coronavirus epidemic has ended, and borders are open, but the tourist flow from the CIS has not reached the 2019 level, and from other countries, it has decreased fourfold. Even the COVID-impacted 2020 saw more international visitors than 2023.
