: Do not enter - kill!

Attracting tourist flows is a problem that almost every large city faces. Moscow is no exception.

Moscow is very inconvenient for tourists, experts who took part in the Polit.ru seminar and the Russian Academy of National Economy and Civil Service under the President of the Russian Federation (one of the series of seminars dedicated to the development of the city development strategy) agreed.

Internal tourists are frightened, first of all, the high cost of goods and the cost of rent. Coming from abroad (excluding labor migrants-their requests are similar to the requests of internal tourists) are horrified by the absence of any tourism infrastructure. According to Yuri Saprykin, chief editor of Rambler-Afisha, a foreigner recently turned to him on the street with a request to advise regarding the route. He was very happy to hear the answer - Saprykin turned out to be the first Russian in three days to help him.

It is almost impossible to navigate yourself in the city. There is no Information Bureau for tourists, signs are not duplicated in English, there are no street cards. Moreover, guide and maps do not have time for the development of the city. “A year ago, there was no“ arrow ”,“ October October ”and the new Gorky Park - now they are,” said Yuri Saprykin. That is, in fact, there is, and not in tourist routes.

The city is not intended for those who were not born in it. A normal online online information system is needed, experts noted.

To increase the comfort and influx of tourists, three things are needed, says Alexander Sapov, the head of the Capital - International Cultural Center movement. The first is a billing system that would link transport, payment, infrastructure services (a single payment card of total). The second is multi -language: services should be available at least 8 languages. The third is the creation of applications for all modern mobile platforms.

A trip to Moscow is an expensive pleasure. There are no budget airlines, hotels are prohibitively expensive. There are no budget hotels in the center of the capital. However, in Moscow there are inexpensive hostels with the price of Koyka from 500 to 2500 thousand rubles. Only now, as Arik Poghosyan said the owner of Bananas Hostel - one of these hotels, in Moscow there are only 50 of them and they can accept about 2 thousand people. For comparison: there are a hundred in St. Petersburg, and in London about 800. This business can be developed without any administrative resource. However, this is reflected in the price - the cost of rent in Moscow exceeds, say, rent in Lisbon by 8 times.

However, the presence of hostels does not save. Even in order to accept a million tourists, it is necessary for 14 thousand hotel seats no more than “three stars”, says Mikhail Blinkin, the supervisor of the Research Institute of Transport and Road Facilities. And taking into account the factor of seasonality, it is necessary even more-25-30 thousand. The total number of rooms formally satisfies the needs - 85 thousand rooms in 267 hotels. However, 30 percent of hotels - 4 and 5 stars (they are almost exclusively in the Central Federal District). In addition, most of the rooms in hotels are far from occupied by tourists. “Moscow hotels are guided by a business stream,” the official report of the Moscow and the Government of Moscow notes for 2010. At the same time, according to official figures, only 43 percent of the guests of the capital from the countries of the far abroad indicated tourism as the purpose of the trip.

The trouble is in the capital and with a variety of tourist routes. In fact, all of them have been worked out since the 70s by several generations of Soviet guides. There were practically no new ones. According to the coordinator of the Archnadzor public movement Marina Khrustaleva, tourist booklets and guidebooks contain an extremely meager set of information for the visitor. The Kremlin, the Church, the Stalinist skyscrapers and restaurants are almost everything that is in them. Meanwhile, she assures, in Moscow there is something to see: for example, the architectural avant-garde: “There are about 500 houses of the 20-30s in Moscow, it would have been possible to make several tourist routes that are enough for a week of stay in Moscow.”

Other experts believe that industrial tourism cannot rely on such complex images and products. Rather, we can talk about the already famous metropolitan brands - the Bolshoi Theater, the Kremlin and so on. “At the EXPO in Shanghai in the French pavilion there were very simple symbols - Notre Dam, Renoir, and so on. And in Russian - Dunno, ”said Grigory Revzin, art critic, special correspondent of the Kommersant Publishing House.

At the moment, there is no reliable data on the tourist stream, Marina Khrustaleva is sure. The Moscow authorities cite the following statistics - more than 4 million foreign citizens arrive in the city annually, but admit that up to 80 percent of them are actually arrived with working purposes. Expert assessment of tourist flow from abroad is no more than a million people a year. At the same time, according to the professor and the head of the department of the territorial development of the RANEPA under the President, the professor of the Moscow Architectural Institute (Markhi) Vyacheslav Glazychev, 8 out of 10 foreigners who visited the city are not going to visit Moscow.

“One million tourists a year means that there is no tourism in Moscow. There is no industry, industrial tourism, there is “manufactory” tourism, ”said Grigory Revzin. In many ways, such a situation is connected with the position of the former Moscow authorities, who even declared the need for tourism destruction.

To attract tourists, it is advisable to operate, first of all, already well -known brands and work with the image of Moscow. In principle, there is already an image, but specific. According to Revzin, the whole image of Moscow, which is well perceived and settled both in the heads of our compatriots and foreigners - a lot of money, great power, big vices: “For a foreigner, a trip to Moscow is extreme tourism, this is a trip to hell. Moscow for them is the place where the USSR, Lenin, where a person was launched into space and where terrible crime. ”

With this way, he said, you can also work: you can create a museum of the Gulag or the entire former USSR. The question is whether Moscow wants to see itself. And to decide on the whole: whether Moscow is needed by tourists or Yuri Luzhkov was still right and we are better off to stay old customs and not abuse the attraction of visiting guests.