Industrial Tourism as a New Trend in the Development of Siberian Single-Industry Towns

Abstract

Most Russian regions possess a certain degree of tourist and recreational potential but fail to produce any kind of tourism industry, or it develops chaotically, with no regard to the tourist infrastructure. This is especially relevant for numerous single-industry cities and towns in the Siberian Federal District, where travel industry could diversify the local economy and improve the socio-economic status. The authors believe that industrial tourism can help Siberian single-industry towns to overcome the crisis scenario. This research covered the regions of Altai, Kemerovo, Khakassia, and Irkutsk. The sampling relied on official tourist portals and independent sites where single-industry towns promote themselves as tourist and recreational places. The authors used scientific, theoretical, and quantitative methods to analyze the tourist potential of these territories and study the foreign experience of large enterprises in industrial tourism. The article contains a review of relevant scientific publications and introduces some recommendations on the development of industrial tourism in single-industry towns of the Siberian Federal District, which can be extrapolated to other single-industry urban settlements in Russia.