Designing modern tourist destinations

Destination design technologies are an important strategic tool for the development and promotion of territorial tourism potentials. Territorial master planning technologies are the most used of them today. However, the complexity of the tasks of designing destinations is determined not only by the multicomponent nature and often the contradiction of methodological principles, but also by the complexity, versatility and multi-scale nature of the very concepts of "design" and "destination".

Often we can find the opinions that certain sights have been excessively "landscaped", excessively "restored" and excessively "equipped", turning into some kind of "faint" attractive zones, and as a result – them have lost their originality and outwardly became similar to each other. The "core object" itself retains its uniqueness and specificity. But the arrangement of the space around it – parks, walking areas, recreation areas, etc., and often internal interiors, expositions, events are of the same form with others, similar and uniform, they are, because of which the quality and completeness of perception by tourists and sightseers of these objects is sharply reduced. Therefore, tourists and sightseers not fully appreciate these objects and do not realize their uniqueness. And as a result, we can get tourist objects that lose their external expressiveness and originality against the background of general landscaping and renovation.

Recently, we had a chance to review the description of the project "Secret Russia" by Alexei Shevtsov, executive director of the Museum Complex "Levitanovsky Plyos". The project is dedicated to the revival of the city of Plyos. This document contains the "Seven Principles of Tourism". We believe they are very interesting and can reasonably be considered the basic conceptual principles for designing modern tourist destinations. We will give them briefly.

1. Minimize interference with the architectural and natural environment: avoid over-investment and over-beautification.

2. Cultivate of difference: choose your own development vector and don’t be too zealous with standardization.

3. Zooming in: small towns [and individual objects] should be shown slowly and through a magnifying glass, their attractiveness is in small details, fine drawings, soft colors.

4. Encourage "geographical discoveries: give guests the opportunity to explore the entire territory, not just the tourist façade.

5. Make events meaningful: they should form a unique pattern for the local calendar.

6. Adhere to the authentic nature of local myths: organically grown myths and brands are more useful than precocious and artificially introduced ones.

7. Remember that life is more important than tourism: the interests of the local population are priority in relation to the requests of guests.

The main task of designing tourist destinations is in many ways similar to the tasks of tourist branding – to form an image of the territory: destination, city, country, or to model a certain reality – meanings of the territory – in the perception of its addressee (consumer, potential tourist, sightseer). To date, there is no single algorithm for designing and arranging tourist destinations, and the feasibility of its development is largely a debatable issue.

The current issue of our journal attempts to present some practices and approaches in the problematic field of designing tourist destinations, experience in addressing practical problems of their development.