Socio-geographical approach to assessing the tourist potential’s attractiveness of the Carpathian region
Authors: Mashika Hanna 
Published: March 2020

Tourism is one of the most important sectors of the Ukrainian economy. Analysis of the tourism potential of the country and its individual regions, in particular its attractiveness – the ability to attract potential tourists, is necessary for the effective functioning of the tourism sector.
The purpose of the article is to justify the socio-geographical approach to assessing the tourist potential’s attractiveness of the region and analyse the conditions and factors for such estimation in the objective (quantitative) and subjective (qualitative) dimensions on the basis of factor criteria and performance indicators.
The tourist potential’s attractiveness of the region is the degree of attractiveness of the natural, ethnocultural, socio-historical and other tourist resources of the region, its socio-economic and transport infrastructure, reception places and attendants.
The tourist potential’s attractiveness of the Carpathian region is ensured by its diversity of relief forms, the picturesque of landscapes, the presence of unique wild nature areas, a significant amount of rivers, the purity of natural waters, a lot of forests, and the richness of flora and fauna. The wealth of anthropogenic tourism resources of the Carpathian region leads to a high attraction of the social segment of the tourist potential of the Carpathian region. All regional centres, a lot of small towns and villages, which have survived, the samples of Old Ukrainian church wooden architecture, castles, religious buildings, defensive structures, old residential and economic buildings of the region have a high attraction. The attractiveness is also ensured by the presence of numerous parks, cafes, restaurants, theatres, museums, cultural and lifestyle habits of local residents, including Hutsuls and Boyks. Along with this, a combination of natural and social tourism resources created in the Carpathian region favourable conditions for the development of all kinds of ethnic and event tourism, rural green tourism.
Based on the analysis of approaches to the component of the tourism potential’s assessment and attractiveness, own socio-geographical approach to the construction of a system for assessing the tourist potential’s attractiveness of the region has been formed. These include natural tourist resources, tourist resources of anthropogenic origin, tourist infrastructure, marketing and pricing policies, labour resources, provision of catering facilities, sports and entertainment facilities, the level of transport infrastructure’s development, tourist safety, environmental quality, finance, investment in tourism sphere, general image of the region, economic attractiveness, management, state support and political stability, information. The peculiarity of the proposed approach is to assess the conditions and factors of the tourism potential of the region in an objective and subjective way. Each of these characteristics is described by relevant factor criteria and may be defined by specific quantitative and / or qualitative indicators.
With the help of the constructed indicators’ system of tourism potential attraction estimation, we are able to quantitatively and qualitatively estimate the level of tourism industry development in the Ukrainian regions; to highlight the causal relationships in determining the level of tourist potential’s attractiveness; to identify the factors that influence the development of tourism activity, in that destabilizing; to carry out monitoring of tourism activity in the region with the possibility of predicting changes in tourist activity taking on its basis optimal managerial decisions at the state and regional levels.
Key words: tourist potential, tourist potential’s attractiveness, Carpathian region, natural and anthropogenic tourist resources.