Geospatial-cartographic analysis of tourist opportunities in Ukraine based on alternative tourist accessibility

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to substantiate geospatial-cartographic analysis methodology of alternative tourist accessibility for Ukrainian regions by individual types of tourism and highlighting the results of its practical approbation.

The main material. The article provides the evaluation results of the tourist destinations (administrative regions) according to the author’s method of determining alternative tourist accessibility. Alternative tourist accessibility at this stage of the research involves assessment of territorial development potential as mutually exclusive opportunities, the choice of these opportunities for implementation of resort-healing, cultural-entertainment, cognitive, religious, hiking types of tourism. It is a continuation of the search for an optimal model of destination selection factors from the consumer’s point of view on tourist services to be taken into account. Using the combination of the rating approach, the method of places sums, mapping for processing of basic and special indicators of territorial, practical, price, information accessibility for Cherkasy region as a base example and other Ukrainian regions - competitors in above-mentioned types of tourism, we obtained practical recommendations not only for Cherkasy region itself, but also for other alternative areas. The authors established that Geospatial and cartographic analyses are the most appropriate at all stages of research: from studying the territory to presenting results and making administrative decisions.

Conclusions and further research. The research revealed that Kyiv region is the leader in cultural-entertainment, religious and educational types of tourism. Odesa region is the leader in resort-healing, hiking types of tourism due to the developed infrastructure component, good basic territorial accessibility and active promotion of thematic tourism products. Cherkasy region is significantly behind the leaders in terms of territorial and practical factors of alternative tourist accessibility. The main competitors for Cherkasy region are the following regions: Vinnytsia and Poltava - in cognitive tourism, Vinnytsia and Mykolaiv - in health resorts, Poltava and Kherson - in cultural and entertainment, Vinnytsia and Khmelnytsky - in relation to religion. We found that the most stringent competition for development in the tourism sector was in walking sports and sports and recreation. The advantage of Cherkasy region is the price factor. Among the regions that occupy the lowest rungs, and often cannot compete with stronger regions due to a variety of insufficient factors, we single out Ternopil, Sumy, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr regions by various types of tourism. As a promising direction of research, we define the adaptation of the proposed methodology at the united territorial community’s level.