Logistics of urban tourism as part of cities’ sustainable development

Abstract

Tourism is now one of the most dynamic components of regions and cities economy. The urgent problems in this regard include the task of ensuring the sustainable development of tourism industry in cities. It’s especially true for the most popular tourist destinations, i.e. metropolitan and historic cities. This means tourist load increasing on the existing cities’ resource base of tourism, as well as on the whole urban economy, population, development and nature. In this context the task of tourism sustainable development in cities requires the consolidation of efforts of various scientific and practical directions, including tourism logistics [1], that studies the flows phenomena in the tourism industry, highlighting the tourist traffic (flow of tourists) as the main stream, and financial, informational, commodity, personnel, material flows as servicing (additional) ones. The task of tourism logistics in travel industry sustainable development is to regulate the main flow (i.e. tourist traffic), in order to ensure the conservation of the tourism resource base in cities and in rural areas in order to tourism activities further development. This problem is now quite noticeable not only in cities - the world’s largest tourist centers, but it’s also acute in many cities of Ukraine. This concerns, first of all, Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa and other Ukrainian cities - popular tourist destinations. The problems of tourist overloading in Lviv are quite well-known recently, which was covered, in particular, in the author's publications [2, p.195]. So it’s right time for working out the effective logistic strategy for tourism sustainable development in cities. This strategy, developed by the author, is based on two concepts. The first one is the concept of tourist decentralization, the second - the concept of reversible logistics. The first concept involves efficient logistic organization of the city's tourist area ( LO CTA). The main components of LO CTA are: 1) geologistical identification of tourism resource base; 2) logistical planning of tourist flows; 3) logistical design of tourism infrastructure; 4) logistical design of supply chains for tourism infrastructure objects [2, p.200].