Baltic Visitor

An article in the Baltic Times claims, with good reason given the growth in visitor numbers, that the three Baltic countries are ‘losing their novelty appeal for international travelers’. This is not meant in a negative sense. Baltic travel expert Neil Taylor, author of several guidebooks including the excellent Tallinn Mini City Guide for Bradt, is quoted extensively in the piece:

The type of traveler visiting here is broadening. The stags will come and go, but apart from them more younger people and backpackers are coming. They travel individually, not in tour groups, and they do things more casually.

And now there are more of the very elderly, who feel it is now a safe place to come. They are always the last people to come to a new destination. Now it is clear there is no need for adventure, and there is a good range of three and four star hotels, which is what they require.

He argues that the recent Tallinn riots did little harm to the reputation of the region, as they were little reported in the international press. On the subject of Riga’s stag parties, he suggests that ‘people who are ripped off usually ask for it’.

His is an optimistic view in which the tourist scene is maturing and reaching a wider range of people, no longer requiring an adventurous approach to travel. My own experience of visiting the Baltics, with my first trip almost a decade ago, would certainly bear this out – as well as Taylor’s argument that it was never really all that adventurous. Back then the cheap flight crowds may not have ‘discovered’ the Baltics, but they were hardly wild outposts. There was, however, a thriving backpacker scene which had the feel of being a little ahead of an inevitable rush of visitors. The In Your Pocket guides ruled the roost in a way which they do not any longer, with far less competition from major guidebooks than they now have.

Another note of optimism comes in the assertion that tourists are no longer just visiting the three capitals, but are exploring further afield. Again, this is a definite sign of a region ‘maturing’ as a tourist destination. And as the writer of a forthcoming guidebook to the Baltics, I have to admit that it comes as a relief to know that all those pages on provincial Latvia will not go to waste…

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