Digital technologies for the excursion services development in religious tourism

The article deals with promising directions of introducing innovations in the sphere of religious tourism, which is one of the potentially attractive directions of business development. The article is focused on excursion service in religious tourism. The author attempts to identify promising areas of application of innovative technologies in excursion services for satisfying the historical and cognitive interest associated with visiting religious sites. The hypothesis of the study is the assumption that using innovations will contribute to the growth in demand for religious tourism services and will attract families with children (solvent demand), whose rest is aimed at obtaining new information and knowledge about the destination. The system and situational approach, modeling of socio-economic processes, formal logical analysis are the main research methods. The results of the work consist in the study of statistical indicators of tourism in Russia and the demand for services of historical and cultural tourism, which can be increased with help of digital technologies in excursion services. The main directions of future research are related to the elaborating theoretical and methodological foundations of religious tourism as an activity of social and cultural importance for the development of the country’s regions.