By Vestnik Kavkaza
Yesterday the expert medium forum “Cognizing the Union State: from Brest to Vladivostok” opened in Moscow. For two days more than 60 Belarusian and Russian experts are discussing ways of boosting the tourist attractiveness of both countries. The State Secretary of the Union State, Grigori Rapota, believes that “cognition causes friendship and understanding in the future. We will always discuss the topic.”
The ambassador of Belarus to Russia, Igor Petrishenko, stated that “since 2012 the capacity of the hotel network has doubled in Minsk. 71.5% volume of the whole export of our tourist services is for the Russian Federation. I believed in the tourist boom within the Union State when I heard about hours-long traffic jams on the Minsk Highway in Moscow. It turned out that Russians were rejecting vacations in foreign countries during the November and May holidays. The most popular destination was Belarus. So our task is to broaden the Minsk Highway M1 and improve infrastructure to increase the tourist inflow.”
According to Petrishenko, such a growth of Belarus’s attractiveness to Russian tourists is connected with the foreign political situation: “Of course, changes in the world foreign political structure turned out to be beneficial for us; they increased the attractiveness of the republic to Russian business and common consumers. However, our goal is to be a bridge, an entrance through which citizens of the Union State can discover the countries of the Old World over again. It is nice to start a European trip from unique cross-border facilities, such as the Bialowieza Forest, the August Canal, “The Great Amber Ring” water route. Our goal is to create a united humanitarian, cultural, tourist space from Vladivostok to Brest. High-quality tourist products should be available for all the citizens of the Union State.”
Petrishenko spoke about the state concept of development of tourism in 2016-2020 and Russian- Belarusian cooperation: “Documents on cooperation in the sphere of tourism have been signed with 19 Russian regions. There are more than 750 agreements signed between business entities. Belarusian tourist and information centers work in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Smolensk. The project of the concept of the state program for tourism development in 2016-2020 is being publicly discussed in the republic. It is focused on further segmentation and differentiation of tourist services. I am sure it will bring the necessary synergetic effect to the sphere. As for priorities for development, these are cultural and educational, ecological, hunting, business, car tourism; recreation, health-promoting, medical, sporting, fan tourism, as well as religious, cross-border, and agro-tourism. It is planned to pay special attention to the development of social tourism orientated towards the demands of special categories of our population – the elderly, children and disabled people. By the way, booking of New Year's Eve tours to Belarus began a month earlier this year.”
