Poland’s Tourism Industry Is Helping Ukrainian Refugees

Sending assist from farther afield

Bigger journey corporations have additionally joined the hassle to supply services and providers to refugees. Airbnb, in partnership with its nonprofit arm Airbnb.org, has been working with hosts to produce free momentary housing for as much as 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine to neighboring nations like Poland, Hungary and Romania.

Thousands of people around the world have additionally booked and paid for Airbnbs inside Ukraine, with no plans to journey there in efforts to ship cash to Ukrainian householders. Between March 2 and three, greater than 61,000 nights had been booked in Ukraine, 34,000 of them by folks in the US, the corporate reported.

Paige Holden, 43, an inside designer from Los Angeles, was at first skeptical concerning the initiative, involved that if she booked an Airbnb property the hosts wouldn’t be capable of entry the funds. However after reaching out to a few of them and seeing their desperation, she instantly booked an residence in a Kyiv property, which despatched $4,700 to a household of 5.

“After I despatched out an inquiry, a girl in Kyiv despatched me an image of her three younger kids, huddled in a chilly, darkish basement crammed with different distraught households,” Ms. Holden stated.

“It’s a must to keep in mind that these folks misplaced all the things in a single day, their properties, their incomes, they don’t have anything left however to struggle for his or her lives,” she stated.

Over the previous week, Benjamin Wagner, 27, a part-time tour information and historical past scholar based mostly in Berlin, has been driving refugees from that metropolis’s central practice station to host households throughout town, volunteering by means of a What’s App group.

“Right now, it doesn’t matter the place you’re from, what you do or the place you’re employed,” Mr. Wagner stated. “All of us have one collective duty to assist our Ukrainian brothers and sisters. This humanitarian disaster impacts us all, and tomorrow we may very well be of their footwear.”