Faculty of Geography employees participated in the main tourist exhibition of Russia

On 19–22 March the 11th International Tourist Exhibition Intourmarket-2016 took place in Moscow. It was supported by the Government of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Federal Agency for Tourism, World Tourism Organization, Russian Union for Tourism Industry and Russian Tour Operators Association.

Intourmarket is the only exhibition in Russia, where one can see all the tourist products provided by our country, as the participants include representatives of all Russian constituent entities. It can be safely said that Intourmarket is currently at the top of Russian tourist trend – import substitution in tourism.

Besides Russian participants, there were also guests from the countries, where Russian tourists prefer traveling to, such as Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt, Spain, Cyprus, China, Morocco, Romania and Thailand. CIS and Baltic countries also took an active part in the exhibition.

Altai Krai was acting as Intourmarket’s strategic partner for the third year in a row. The work of the exhibition started with “Altai Krai Day”. The region had a site of 1000 sq. km, where it exposed its tourism companies, resorts, health-centers, folk crafts, ecological tourism opportunities, organized folk ensembles’ performances and so on. Altai Krai Governor A.B. Karlin was traditionally working at the exhibition.

Altai State University prepared an exposition in the framework of the whole Altai Krai exhibition stand. It was organized by the Department of Recreational Gorography, Tourism and Regional Marketing and included such areas as using historical and cultural heritage of the territory in tourism, educational tourism, ASU students’ field research sites, presentation of new tour itineraries. Everyone had a chance to go deep into Altai history by trying on a Turkic armour suit or Kumandin national costume. The exposition awoke visitors’ interest.

“This exposition turned out to be the best of the 11 ones, which had already been conducted. Actually, all of them were good, but this one embodied everything we wanted to show: different types of tourism, various folk crafts, great range of tourist and health resorts of Altai Krai. We had no such exhibition before!” noted member of the Council of Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation Mikhail Shetinin at the closing ceremony.