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Although often underestimated, the tourism industry can help promote peace and stability in developing countries by providing jobs, generating income, diversifying the economy, protecting the environment, and promoting cross-cultural awareness. Tourism is the fourth largest industry in the global economy.

Tourism is a vital part of the global economy. Generating roughly $1 trillion in global receipts in 2008 (up 1.8 percent from 2007), international tourism ranked as the fourth-largest industry in the world, after fuels, chemicals, and automotive products. The breadth of international travel also has greatly expanded in recent years to encompass the developing world. In 1950 just fifteen destinations—primarily European—accounted for 98 percent of all international arrivals. By 2007 that figure had fallen to 57 percent. Once essentially excluded from the tourism industry, the developing world has now become its major growth area. Tourism is a key foreign exchange earner for 83 percent of developing countries and the leading export earner for one-third of the world’s poorest countries. For the world’s forty poorest countries, tourism is the second-most important source of foreign exchange after oil.

The economic might of the tourist industry has helped transform societies, often for the better. Tourism has several advantages over other industries:

• It is consumed at the point of production so that it directly benefits the communities that provide the goods.

• It enables communities that are poor in material wealth but rich in culture, history, and heritage to use their unique characteristics as an income-generating comparative advantage.

• It creates networks of different operations, from hotels and restaurants to adventure sports providers and food suppliers. This enables tourist centers to form complex and varied supply chains of goods and services, supporting a versatile labor market with a variety of jobs for tour guides, translators, cooks, cleaners, drivers, hotel managers, and other service sector workers. Many tourism jobs are flexible or seasonal and can be taken on in parallel with existing occupations, such as farming.

• It tends to encourage the development of multiple-use infrastructure that benefits the host community, including roads, health care facilities, and sports centers, in addition to the hotels and high-end restaurants that cater to foreign visitors.

Main types of tourism in Russia

Russia’s territory stretches for 10 000 km from east to west and almost for 3 000 km from northern latitudes to subtropical areas in the south. A variety of landscapes provides opportunities to develop many types of tourism. Russia has sea resorts at the Black Sea in the south and the Baltic Sea in the north-west which makes it suitable for beach rest, medical treatment and rehabilitation. Ultima Thule gives visitors a chance to observe polar lights or take an ethnic tour to northern peoples, or take part in deer safari on tundra lands.

The presence of mountains provides opportunities for mountaineering (rock climbing, caving, hiking, rafting along rapid mountain rivers and skiing, mountain biking and delta plane sports) as well as rehabilitation at mineral water resorts.

Full-flowing and wide rivers like the Volga, the Yenisei or the Lena give excellent possibilities for cruises, fishing and various types of rafting. Other cruising destinations include north-western waters of Russia. As a rule, numerous lakes are picturesque and clean. Lake waters are clean not just by appearance: in Karelia and in the Baikal it is drinkable.

The forests of the Central Russia, foothills of the Caucasus, Siberian taiga and the Far East are full of animals and birds attracting hunting tour lovers. In Russia, there are enough of places with wild virgin nature which creates ideal conditions for environmental routes development. As compared to many European countries, a tourist who travels over Russia may meet no people for quite a long time. In Siberia, you may drive along a highway laid across forests for several hours and meet no cars! Yet, it is rather possible to encounter a brown bear in adjacent woods. In Astrakhan Region, on your way to the fishing camp in the delta of the Volga River, a forester will show you a flamingo, pelicans and other rare bird species. Horse riding around the Altai Krai resembling fairytale worlds will leave no nature lover indifferent.

Russia’s rich history bears the traces of Vikings, ancient Slavs, Mongols and Tatars, Scythians, Swedish, Greeks, Genoese and other peoples. Our ancestors inherited certain features of their appearances, faiths, cultures, languages and traditions. This factor stimulates internal tourism development and makes Russia’s peoples interesting for each other. Grand princes, monarchs and emperors adjoined and lost lands and peoples; travelers went deep into the virgin lands of the North, Siberia and the Far East and discovered new spacious valleys, rivers, seas and oceans. Democratic and authoritarian rulers replacing one another, built palaces and mansions, established museums, destroyed Christian churches and Buddhist temples; left us their mausoleums and grand multi-storey buildings, powerful power plants and at the same time, camps for the repressed, corn fields, entered space, created unique armaments and restored temples. All these events made Russia the country any visitor may now explore and experience at an excursion tour.

In addition to natural and historic and cultural attractions, there certain social factors having a positive influence over tourism development, that is a high purchasing power of foreign currencies and freedom of travelling over the major part of the country’s territory including areas prospective from the tourist point of view such as the Far East, Sakhalin, the Kurile islands, the Urals, the North of Russia as well as Nizhny Novgorod and Samara which were formerly closed for foreigners.

Domestic and external tourism in Russia is characterized by a variety of types. Among the ones developing the most rapidly, one can name environmental, sportive, extreme, mountaineering, cognitive, recreational, cruise, fishing and hunting, event-oriented and gastronomic types of travelling. Individual and young people’s tourism is also becoming more and more popular.