Innovative trends and global threats of COVID-19 pandemic: mechanisms for the tourist industry of Russia

The article focuses on the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic to the tourism industry in Russia. Tourism has long become a way of life for many people. It have been recently reflected in an increase in tourist arrivals and income from tourism in various destinations around the world, including Russia. Therefore, pandemic hit the travel industry so hard, and that is why individual industries and consumers of tourism services felt it so painfully. And thence we can see a rapid increase in arrivals in destinations, where the restrictions associated with measures to prevent a pandemic are being removed partly or completely. Today, the opinion is being formed that a pandemic is not a sentence, but rather a stimulus for the industry’s innovative, creative development, an opportunity to take a more sustainable path. Nevertheless, Russian industry problems related to the pandemic and measures to prevent it. These problems are structured and analyzed in the article. Today, experts and industry are actively making hypotheses about what the tourism industry will be like after the end of the pandemic, but these forecasts are based on many unknowns and are only partly true. However, already today we can observe the formation of new trends in the industry development in the near future.