Assessment of the attractiveness of material objects of the historical and cultural heritage of the Carpathian region

The Carpathian region has a high tourist and recreational potential for the develop- ment of cultural and educational tourism for both domestic and foreign tourists. The purpose of this scientific work is to assess the attractiveness of the material objects of the historical and cultural heritage of the Carpathian region based on the results of the survey of respondents, which were obtained during a sociological study within the framework of the «Carpathian Cultural Route» project. The subject of the study is the analysis of the results of a questionnaire survey of respondents regarding the attractiveness of historical and cultural objects in the Ivano-Frankivsk and Transcarpathian regions. The object of the research is tourists who visited historical and cultural sites in the Ivano-Frankivsk and Transcarpathian regions. The originality of the study is that the authors for the first time assessed the attractiveness of material objects of the historical and cultural heritage of the Carpathian region by improving the criteria based on processing the answers of respondents to a questionnaire. As a result, 264 respondents over the age of 18 who visited historical and cultural sites and used tourist services in the Carpathian region gave answers. It was found that 92% of respondents from the total sample are citizens of Ukraine, 31.1% are people aged 30 to 39 years. The largest share of tourists recorded in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, which is 22% of the total number of surveyed respondents, which indicates that tourists are most attracted by material objects of historical and cultural heritage in the regional city, in second place is Nadvirnyanskyi (Ivano-Frankivsk region) and Rakhiv districts (Transcarpathian ragion). The researchers evaluated the attractiveness of material objects of the historical and cultural heri- tage of the Ivano-Frankivsk and Transcarpathian regions according to 8 criteria, 6 of which are proposed by the authors of the study:cultural and historical value, pricing policy, recreational infrastructure, information availability (incl. in a foreign language), territo- rial accessibility to facilities, as well as service quality. As a result, the respondents gave the largest number of answers according to the rating «excellent» according to the criterion «emotional comfort», which was 70.1% of the surveyed tourists, the least – according to the indicator «information availability» (35%), which indicates the limited information about the historical – cultural objects of the Carpathian region. A list of the most popular historical and cultural objects of the Ivano-Frankivsk and Transcarpathian regions was compiled based on the answers of the respondents, and the main directions of further tourist trips were determined. Nadvirna, Verkhovyna districts and the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, which the surveyed respondents plan to visit in the future, made it to the top 3.