Rei Inna Yurievna

Any tourism is attractive when it is a full-fledged tourist product, with a high level of quality of all elements of the tour: travel to the country, an appropriate hotel base, ease of licensing procedures, availability and readiness of the tour facility itself, transport opportunities, ease of navigation and other elements. There are no trifles in tourism. The sights themselves cannot be a ready-made tourist product.

Tourism is a set of certain actions that create a tourism product by the forces of the state and the tour community.

Such a tourist product has not yet been formed, it is at the stage of formation, study, often even description. It should be borne in mind that, firstly, we were late in principle, since tourism, as a phenomenon, has been actively forming in many countries since the beginning of the 19th century and is still developing very consistently. Having started to develop tourism in the conditions of established markets, we will have to reorient tourists. This requires a whole strategy, than we can attract them to turn the flows in our direction.

On the other hand, we have in our hands such powerful tools that have appeared recently, such as, for example, it technologies, new types of marketing and integration, which generate processes faster and dramatically increase our chances of success.

In addition, the state is involved in this process, which means that efforts are multiplying. It is all the more unforgivable that, as time shows, these efforts often turn out to be empty and ineffective. Of the adopted several state programs for the development of tourism, almost none of them worked.

To accelerate the formation of our own tourism product, clear instruments of state support are needed: tax preferences for those who equip infrastructure, a system of financial attractiveness of investments, a system of compensation for the costs of tour operators. Such tools are needed, but they are a little late.

The EXPO-2017 exhibition gave our government an understanding of the need to create conditions for the liberalization of permits. But as time has shown, this did not become the main incentive for traveling to Kazakhstan. The EXPO was a ready-made tourist product, but when the event ended, the number of tourists dropped.

We have a number of tour operators that have been dealing with inbound tourism quite successfully for a long time. but overall the problem is not resolved.

Our tourism products are poorly packaged, we have no idea who is the consumer of our services and, naturally, we do not understand what services to offer them.

If we talk about the main problems in the development of tourism, we must also say about our unwillingness to accept the main challenge of our time: there is no appropriate staff. In our country, all personnel training is centered around training and retraining courses for tour guides. Without belittling their significance, we are still talking about something else.

It is necessary to seriously prepare the organizers of the tourism product, analysts, special marketers, financiers, managers of the tour destination, IT specialists, programmers, researchers and scientists in the field of tourism.

We need to try to compete with similar services in other countries, to offer these services in a better and more professional manner.

Today, in our country, tourism is most often carried out by those who have not managed to do anything else, on a leftover principle. this does not allow for an adequate tourism policy. Only emerging modern hotels are bringing the requirements to the qualifications of the staff.

We need specialists who would understand both tourism and tourism products, and IT. And, probably, tourism managers will fade into the background, the client himself will form a tour for himself, being at home or at work, but he should be able to maintain a virtual connection with the tourist services sales office.