Geographical and logistical factors of sustainable development of rural tourism in the context of regional economy
Authors: Smyrnov I. 
Published: December 2016

Rural tourism is now seen as an important direction of development of the regional economy. From the perspective of sustainable development rural tourism affects the economic, social and environmental aspects of the regional and local economy. Rural tourism is closely linked with agrotourism, eco-tourism, natural tourism and so on. Sustainable rural tourism can be realized by applying logistic, geographic and marketing approaches as components of sustainable development strategies. Logistics approach is determined by logistic potential of resource base of rural tourism and appropriate tourist flows regulation. In this context in the article the concept of tourism capacity or capacity of the resource base of rural tourism is used. The problem of the definition of tourism pressure on the resource base of rural tourism, particularly in natural landscapes is disclosed. Unlike environmental and recrealogical sciences, which stop at the capacity definition of the resource base of tourism, tourism logistics compares this figure with the existing tourist flows and accordingly determines the safe way of tourism management to ensure its sustainable nature. It was shown that these strategies boil down to two basic types – the further development of tourism in a particular area or limit such activities to conserve the resource base of tourism. Recreational (travel) load is the indicator that reflects the impact of tourism on the resource base of tourism (especially landscape complex), expressed by the number of tourists or tourists-days per area unit or per tourist site for the certain period of time (day, month, season year). There are actual, allowable (the maximum) and destructive (dangerous) types of travel load. The latter can lead recreational area or resource base of rural tourism to destruction. Thus, depending on the intensity of tourism resource base using in rural tourism it may change – according to tourist consumption. Large number of tourists affects the entire range of recreational destinations and their individual components. The most vulnerable part of the environment in this sense is vegetation, except that significant changes may occur with soil, water bodies, air and so on. The geographic dimension of the problem of rural tourism sustainable development includes the concept of zoning, ie the division of the territory, offering to develop rural tourism in several zones with different modes of travel usage – from a total ban (in protected areas) for complete freedom with transitional stages, involving various limit degrees in the development of rural tourism. Marketing approach reflects the application of the curve R. Butler to the stages of development of rural tourism destinations with the release of such steps as: research, involvement, development, consolidation, stagnation (also called “saturation”), revival or decline. Shown the models that link the stage of resource base tourist development (under “Curve Butler”), strength of tourism consumption the magnitude of such effects (eg weak (disperse) impact in large scale, strong (concentrated) impact in large scale, strong (concentrated) impact in small scale, weak (disperse) impact in small scale), dynamics of tourism development at the territory.