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Re: Armenia's Economic Pulse
The motel bid might have been a slight exaggeration, but I do hope you get the point. In Armenia w/ about $100/day you can get 4 or 5 start treatment near the city center in Yerevan. Try to do the same around Madison/Broadway in New York and you can expect to pay 2-3 or even 4 times more. The point is there isn't a demand for hotels, otherwise there would be the supply. The few oligarch mega hotels, though disgusting, have nothing to do with that topic of discussion. I don't think you get the fact that you introduce random negatives that though valid to other discussions, have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
I honestly don't know how many people look up how many percent of things are "restorations" when choosing destination. I would consider myself more educated than the average resident in the west and yet I've never looked up such things. If anything, when living in Austria, my family kind of scoffed at a "tourist attraction" which was just a bunch of rocks supposedly from the middle ages. Honestly it didn't look like anything other than random broken stones. We were only thinking how does this count as anything, the things we have in Iran, if only it had a better government to advertise them. Maybe I'm just too third world for that level of advancement. But if a place can advertise itself as the first christian nation on earth, with a "holy" city with the world's oldest state church, that would be enough to sell me given they were mildly western friendly, and there was an acceptable level of safety and accommodations.
Originally posted by bell-the-cat
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The PR firm isn't trying to sell Armenia to Greeks or Armenians or Georgians or Iranians or any of the countries whose values of environmental or cultural conservation match the abject backwardness that is found in Armenia (and that you actually praise 
). It is trying to sell Armenia to sophisticated customers in sophisticated nations, to people that know about proper conservation and where it would be illegal to mistreat the environment or historical monuments in the way that they are casually mistreated and destroyed in Armenia. That casual mistreatment and destruction might be seen by most Armenians as entirely acceptable behaviour - but the average German or Frenchman or Briton would look on the "restoration" activities inflicted on Armenia's historical monuments with horror and disgust and would not choose to travel to such a country when they have things on their own doorstep that are a 100 times better (and 100% original, not 5%).
And since when did US motels cost $150 a night?
). It is trying to sell Armenia to sophisticated customers in sophisticated nations, to people that know about proper conservation and where it would be illegal to mistreat the environment or historical monuments in the way that they are casually mistreated and destroyed in Armenia. That casual mistreatment and destruction might be seen by most Armenians as entirely acceptable behaviour - but the average German or Frenchman or Briton would look on the "restoration" activities inflicted on Armenia's historical monuments with horror and disgust and would not choose to travel to such a country when they have things on their own doorstep that are a 100 times better (and 100% original, not 5%).And since when did US motels cost $150 a night?
I honestly don't know how many people look up how many percent of things are "restorations" when choosing destination. I would consider myself more educated than the average resident in the west and yet I've never looked up such things. If anything, when living in Austria, my family kind of scoffed at a "tourist attraction" which was just a bunch of rocks supposedly from the middle ages. Honestly it didn't look like anything other than random broken stones. We were only thinking how does this count as anything, the things we have in Iran, if only it had a better government to advertise them. Maybe I'm just too third world for that level of advancement. But if a place can advertise itself as the first christian nation on earth, with a "holy" city with the world's oldest state church, that would be enough to sell me given they were mildly western friendly, and there was an acceptable level of safety and accommodations.
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