CURRENT STATE OF INCLUSIVE TOURISM IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION: MANAGEMENT ASPECT

Abstract

More than a third of the Russian population is made up of persons with disabilities, elderly citizens, children and a number of other categories of citizens, which require appropriate infrastructure to ensure conditions for comfortable recreation. That is why the managerial aspect in inclusive tourism is very relevant, as it allows to form favorable conditions for the creation of an accessible environment of tourist facilities and related infrastructure, financing of the most socially and economically significant facilities in the context of the development of the overall strategy in this area. This publication focuses on the current issues: exploring the progress of public planning and analyzing certain achievements in the development of inclusive tourism. The research methods are based on the analysis of fundamental documents: Tourism Development Strategy until 2035, national projects in the field of tourism and hospitality, the project “Accessible Environment”. The key sources of the study were the relevant sections of Rosstat “Tourism”, the Federal Law “On Social Protection of Disabled Persons in the Russian Federation”, as well as a number of statistical indicators from the database “EMISS”. It is concluded that, despite certain successes in the work to equalize the conditions of recreation for different categories of citizens, the speed of tasks implementation and the achieved intermediate values of indicators do not yet allow to achieve significant results in the creation of inclusive, socially oriented tourism in Russia. Another significant management problem in this area is the lack of complete statistics on the basic elements of accessible environment: communications, places of tourist attraction, i.e. tourist infrastructure as a whole.