SF. PETERSBURG, November 5. /TASS/. Russia’s first marketplace for Arctic tours, BestArctic, is set to reach project capacity in 2025, Rustam Romanenkov, executive director of the Arctic Initiative Center, told TASS. The project was launched in August to collect all available tourism offers in the Russian Arctic and to educate future travelers on local culture, history and traditions.

“Although Russia occupies 55% of the entire circumpolar Arctic, similar complex resources have been created in foreign countries, even in the non-Arctic part of Europe, not in Russia. We intend to create a portal that includes all tour operators in the Arctic and the Far East, so that the coverage has reached 100%, not 40-50%. We are going to bring the site to full capacity, gather as many tour operators as possible and present the educational content,” he said.

At the moment, the platform, created in August, includes about 40 tour operators from the Arctic and the Far East. The key feature of the project is the educational approach to arctic tourism. “It’s not just about hosting a tourist in a hotel, we have to explain where the tourist is going, what kind of region it is, what ecosystems exist, how to behave with animals, what peoples live there, what culture and traditions. they have, in a positive sense, forced the tourism industry to educate people to eliminate regional illiteracy and dispel myths about the Arctic,” he added.

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

The portal is the digital copy of the various aspects and stages of the offered travel products, where users can flexibly simulate and assemble their tours in one place. It should be noted that the portal does not aim to replace tourism operators, as its main goal is to integrate all Arctic tourism with related educational content on a single site.

The platform will integrate educational content from other major online educational resources on Arctic topics, such as the Children of the Arctic multilingual portal, which focuses on the languages ​​of the indigenous peoples of northern Russia. BestArctic will present maximum cultural, ethnographic and tourism content, as well as data on the technologies and human resources of the Arctic.