The Secretary General of the World Tourism Organisation, Taleb Rifai, after visiting St. Petersburg in 2016, announced that with all the possibilities the city has, it should host no less than 13 million tourists per year (slightly less than 7 million tourists visited the Northern Capital in 2016). “For this, we must start from the position of selling St. Petersburg only in the summer,” says Andrei Mushkarev, Chairman of the St. Petersburg Tourism Development Committee. “Last year we made changes to the tourist activity law. And next year it will be time to take action in this area.”

The “Calendar of St. Petersburg Events” was created in February 2017 on the St. Petersburg city tourist portal Visit Petersburg.ru. The calendar registers all the significant and major tourist events that will occur in St. Petersburg this year. Elena Ublieva noted that entry into a unified calendar is very important for promoting projects in ExpoForum. “The calendar of events mainly works for tourists. In the 2017 New Year holidays, when the family amusement park “World New Year” opened in ExpoForum, about 390,000 guests came to St. Petersburg, which is 30% more than the year before,” Elena Vladimirovna cited the figures. “Regional tourists are very important for us, we count on attracting them because of the major, striking events. At the exhibition “Hipposphere” there were about 15,000 visitors, 15% of them from the regions.”

The problems of events to attract tourists to the city in the “low” season include poor collaboration between the museums, theatres, restaurants, tour operators and other companies organising holidays, as well as insufficient information about the events. Additionally, many events are not really interesting for the citizens, which is due to the insufficiently professional organisation of the events. “From a qualitative viewpoint, based on the result of the current tourist season, one can indicate not only successes, but also problem areas in St. Petersburg as an international event centre. The problem areas traditionally include poor coordination between the official city, which independently conducts its ‘own’ major events, and the private operators,” Aleksei Sulimov, the Marketing Director for KudaGo indicates the problems. “The level of cooperation among the private players on the event tourist market also leaves something to be desired.”

The discussion participants came to the unanimous conclusion that the next tourist year needs to be the year of synergy by uniting the event organisers, business and the city authorities. A culture of event tourism is just forming in our country, and St. Petersburg has all the chances of becoming a leader in this direction.