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Hotels of Abkhazia and Gagra: why we removed these collections
Editorial Position
Updated:9 min1,807 words

Hotels of Abkhazia and Gagra: why we removed these collections

Here there used to be three roundups: hotels in Gagra by the sea, hotels for families with children, and a list of resorts along the coast. All three have been removed in every language version.

Abkhazia is part of Georgia under international law, occupied by Russia. A hotel roundup invites the reader to stay on this territory, and that is exactly why the genre does not work here: the question of whose houses these are and who never returned to them has not been closed by international bodies, it is being decided every year and out loud. We will not sell lodging on top of that question.

💡 At a glance:

  • which three roundups were removed and what their main focus was
  • what the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights established
  • why the right of displaced people to return makes the hotel genre impossible
  • which Black Sea destinations remain in our live sections
  • Last updated: 09/2026

Why we deleted these guides

The three pieces were structured the same way. Each promised a choice: fifteen options by the sea, fifteen options for families with children, fourteen resorts along the coast. One of them was the most cited Abkhazia page on the site: more than a hundred internal links from our other texts pointed to it. We removed all three and set up redirects from the old addresses to this page.

There is also a telling technical detail worth naming out loud. The Gagra hotel roundup sat in our "Georgia" category. In other words, the site's own taxonomy knew the legal status of the territory, while the text in that category never mentioned it in a single word and described the coast as an ordinary vacation destination. That is exactly the discrepancy we are fixing.

The money side here does not work directly, and we want to be clear about that. The share of non-oil-and-gas revenue in the Russian budget, which includes taxes from the service sector, has grown to roughly 78 percent, while the oil-and-gas share has fallen to roughly 22 percent (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 12/09/2025). The Abkhaz coast is not a separate wallet in this setup: the usual route there goes through Russian territory, and everything paid along the way ends up exactly there.

Whose house this is

On January 21, 2021, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Georgia v. Russia (II) found by sixteen votes to one that an administrative practice existed in violation of Articles 2, 3 and 8 of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. The list named by the court includes unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention, as well as looting and the destruction of villages (European Court of Human Rights, HUDOC database). By the same majority, the court held that the Russian Federation is responsible for events after the end of hostilities on August 12, 2008, within the meaning of Article 1 of the Convention.

The last two items on that list directly concern the genre we were working in. A hotel roundup is a conversation about real estate: where the building stands, what you can see from it, how many rooms it has. When an international court establishes a practice of looting and destruction of villages, a conversation about real estate on the same territory stops being neutral, even if no specific property on our list has any connection to it. We are not going to investigate the history of individual buildings and owners, and we will not do so: we have neither sources of that caliber nor the right to conduct such an investigation.

The ethnic cleansing of the Georgian population in Abkhazia is recorded in the final documents of the OSCE summits in Budapest in 1994, Lisbon in 1996 and Istanbul in 1999. The Budapest document speaks of deep concern over ethnic cleansing, the mass expulsion of people, predominantly Georgians, from their places of residence, and the death of a large number of innocent civilians (1994 CSCE Budapest Document).

The question is not closed today either. Every year since 2008, the UN General Assembly has adopted a resolution on the status of internally displaced persons and refugees from Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region: it condemns forced demographic changes and reaffirms the right of these people to return home in safety and dignity regardless of ethnicity (UN press release GA/12507). In June 2025, the resolution was supported by 107 states, a year earlier by 103 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia).

What Georgian law says

In October 2008, Georgia adopted the law on occupied territories, declaring the territory of the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region occupied (text of the law, official registry matsne.gov.ge). The law prohibits entry to these territories from the Russian side, and entry from any other direction except those specified by law is punishable under the Criminal Code of Georgia by a fine or imprisonment for up to four years (ibid.).

This leads to a simple consequence for a hotel text. A hotel roundup assumes that the reader will travel there, and the usual route comes from the Russian side, meaning from the direction that Georgian law criminalizes. There is no route, no border crossing points, and no caveats about exceptions in this text, and there never will be. The separate piece about the territory itself does not describe the road either.

What this means for you if you are in the EU or the US

Item

Status 09/2026

Source

Legal status

Part of Georgia, occupied by Russia; responsibility for events after 12.08.2008 rests with Russia

ECHR, HUDOC

Rights of displaced persons

Annual UN General Assembly resolution, supported by 107 states in 2025

Georgian MFA

Entry from Russia

Prohibited by Georgian law, punishable by up to four years in prison

matsne.gov.ge

Services related to tourism in Russia

Prohibited by Article 5n(2) of Regulation 833/2014 as amended by Regulation 2025/2033

EUR-Lex

Transition period

Ended 01.01.2026

Skadden, 11.2025

German Foreign Office advisory on Russia

"Vor Reisen in die Russische Föderation wird gewarnt"

Auswärtiges Amt

Card payments from the EU on routes through Russia

Impossible since 10.03.2022

The Moscow Times

The EU sanctions provision concerns tourism activity in Russia, and we will not stretch it to cover Abkhazia: that would be an invented rule. It matters here only insofar as the road to the Abkhaz coast runs through Russian territory, travel to which the German Foreign Office warns against.

Where to go instead

The question was about a warm sea, affordable accommodation, and subtropical greenery. The live sections of the site answer that: Georgia with Batumi and the entire Adjara coast, Turkey, Bulgaria, Montenegro, as well as Greece and Cyprus. Batumi is not a "replacement for Gagra" but a Black Sea resort in its own right, in a country we write about without any caveats.

The overall explanation of the editorial decision for the entire section is collected in the section hub.

Where we stand

We believe that a selection of hotels in occupied territory is not a travel guide but normalization. In our assessment, a list of hotels silently asserts the main thing: that the territory is ordinary, that the question of it is settled, and that going there carries no implications. None of these assertions is true, and we have nothing to back them up with. That is why we deleted all three pieces and will not publish updated versions with a warning at the top.

We also do not name any property from the previous lists. A named hotel in an explanatory text still reads as a recommendation.

We write about a state and its policies, not about people by passport. There are people in Russia who spoke out against the war and received prison sentences for it. Our decision not to publish guides to Russia is about money, sanctions, and reader safety, not nationality.

Publication date: September 3, 2026. Last updated: September 3, 2026.

⁉️🤔 Frequently asked questions

Aren't the people who live there and run guesthouses responsible for the decisions of governments?

No, and our text is not about them. We are accountable for our own format: a hotel roundup is an editorial recommendation to travel, and we are withdrawing it. The issue here is with us, not with the people of the coast, about whom we make no claims.

Why do you cite Georgian sources? Isn't that biased?

The main documents in this text are not Georgian: the ruling was issued by the European Court of Human Rights, the language about ethnic cleansing comes from OSCE final documents, and the right of displaced persons is affirmed by the UN General Assembly. We use Georgia's official registry only for the text of that country's own law.

Did you also delete the family-friendly roundup?

Yes, along with the rest. The type of trip does not change the legal status of the territory, what the court established, or the direction from which people usually travel there.

Does this mean Abkhazia does not exist for you?

On the contrary. We describe its legal status, the court ruling, and the position of international bodies in more detail than we did in a dozen previous resort articles. We removed not the topic, but the commercial format.

Will you bring these lists back?

We make no promises with dates. The decision will be revisited when the grounds listed in the sources block change.

In short

All three hotel roundups for Abkhazia and Gagra have been removed in full. The grounds for the decision: case law established by the ECtHR, UN General Assembly resolutions, and Georgian law. The Black Sea destinations we continue to cover are listed above.

How you can help

We are not raising money and receive nothing from the links below. These are the official websites of organizations working with the consequences of war:

  • UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, unhcr.org
  • UNICEF, unicef.org
  • International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

Sources

Link check date: 03.09.2026.

tourism.com.de Editorial Team
tourism.com.de Editorial TeamTravel editorial team: research, fact-checking, updates→ All publications

A small editorial team writing guides for independent travel. We travel ourselves, but we haven’t been everywhere, so we check prices, opening hours and how to get there against official sources.