Tourism Potential of National Parks: Opportunities for Promotion Through Photo Tourism

The purpose of the present research is to identify the potential and develop proposals for the popularization of photo tourism in Russian national parks. The relevance of the research topic is explained by the fact that the flow of tourists who want to get familiar with various attractions and discover new horizons is growing from year to year. For photo tourism, the main objects of interest for taking a picture are natural, historical, cultural, and socio-economic tourist and recreational resources. Therefore, places with high concentration of such objects and especially areas where they are collocated together, are of particular importance. Specially protected natural areas are one of these types of places. The contemporary consumer of a tourist product becomes more aware of aesthetic and cognitive needs, demands new nonstandard offers from the tourism industry, and seeks new impressions. And everyone, who has visited such places, wants to share this experience with others. Based on this emerging need, tourism has developed a direction such as photo tourism which is a combination of two scopes of activity, namely, tourism and photography that opens up huge opportunities for amateur travelers. The present research is aimed at ordering data on the study of photo tourism in the Russian Federation and making proposals for the development of tourist products. National parks were chosen as the object of the photo tour organization due to special characteristics (the integrity of recreational resources, uniqueness of resources, availability of infrastructure, and high aesthetic component). Creating a photo tour, as well as any other tour, undergoes certain stages. However, when developing a photo tour, in addition to standard indicators, such as the age of consumers, the purpose of travel, and others, it is also necessary to take into account the level of training of participants, their goals, subject matters, technical component, etc. Currently, photo tourism is developing rapidly, offering consumers many different options for photo tours. However, in Russia, photo tourism is still not represented enough and mainly developing as a kind of amateur tourism. In this regard, a problem arises to study photo tourism and to identify its evolution factors.