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Governor says tourist inflow growth of 10% appropriate for Atlai region

Such growth will allow to develop infrastructure so there is no lack of accommodation facilities

MOSCOW, November 21. /TASS/. The annual tourist inflow growth of 10-15% will be appropriate for the Altai region in the near future, regional governor Alexander Karlin said in an interview with TASS. According to him, such growth will allow to develop infrastructure so there is no lack of accommodation facilities.

“We currently have 43 health resorts, including seven kids health resorts as well as around 700 hotels and tourist camps, their number has been constantly increasing, private companies have been building new health resorts. I believe that growing tourist inflow should not be a goal in itself but we need to take two things into consideration: first, the number of tourists and second, the quality of our services. If you ask me, I just don’t know what kind of infrastructure we will need if the tourist inflow grows by 1.5 times,” Karlin said.

According to the regional governor, in 2016, Altai showed good numbers for a Siberian region as 2,000,000 tourists had visited the region by November, so a tourist inflow growth of 10% had been recorded. Karlin also said that the Belokurikha resort had become famous in Russia and abroad, “they have long forgotten what a dead season is”, as hotel occupancy reaches 100% during peak season.

“So if we add 10% growth to the maximum hotel occupancy we will see that infrastructure needs to be developed. According to the 2018 Federal target program on the domestic and inbound tourism development, we have been implementing a unique project, building the Belikurikha-2 resort. Over the past 20 years, no such resorts have been built from scratch in our country,” the governor noted.

“The Altai region is very popular as a health tourism destination. The regional authorities pay much attention to tourism development, the new tourist resort will facilitate the improvement of the region’s health tourism development capabilities,” head of the Federal Agency for Tourism (Rostourism) Oleg Safonov told TASS.

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