ST. PETERSBURG, November 5. /TASS/. Russia's first marketplace for Arctic tours, BestArctic, is due to reach project capacity in 2025, the Arctic Initiative Center's CEO Rustam Romanenkov told TASS. The project was launched in August to collect all available tourist offers in the Russian Arctic and to educate future travelers in local culture, history and traditions.

"Though Russia occupies 55% of the entire circumpolar Arctic, similar complex resources have been created in foreign countries, even in Europe's non-Arctic part, not in Russia. We intend to create a portal featuring all Arctic and Far Eastern tour operators, so that the coverage reached 100%, not 40-50%. We plan to bring the site to full capacity, to aggregate maximum tour operators and to present the educational content," he said.

Right now, the platform, created in August, features about 40 tour operators of the Arctic and the Far East. The project's key feature is the educational approach to Arctic tourism. "It is not just about accommodating a tourist in a hotel, we need to explain where the tourist is going, what kind of region it is, what ecosystems there are, how to behave with animals, what peoples live there, what culture and traditions they have. We are forcing, in a positive sense, the tourism industry to educate people to eliminate regional illiteracy and to dispel myths about the Arctic," he added.

The Center for Arctic Initiatives will organize the Arctic education on the platform together with regional authorities, museums and cultural institutions in the Arctic and with tourism operators. The portal will aggregate big volumes of educational content, so that users could learn in advance a complete picture of every Arctic region.

The portal is the digital copy of various aspects and stages of offered travel products, where users can simulate and flexibly assemble their tours at one place. Noteworthy, the portal does not seek replacing tourist operators, as its main goal is to integrate the entire Arctic tourism with related educational content on one site.

The platform will integrate educational content from other major educational online resources on Arctic topics, such as the Children of the Arctic multilingual portal focusing on languages of the Russian North's indigenous peoples. BestArctic will feature maximum cultural, ethnographic and tourist content, as well as data on the Arctic's technologies and human resources.