Methods of tourist and recreational resources evaluation of dependent countries and territories of the world

Modern political map of the world has preserved many fragments of colonial empires, with various official political statuses. These areas, like any other, have their own tourist-recreational resources and attractive destinations that offer unique opportunities for tourists. The tourist potential of these political entities has not been studied both in the world and in the Russian science about tourism, in the domestic market of tourism they are unknown, and that's why they are not in demand. However, these countries and territories are quite capable to compete with many well-known and “beaten” areas according to the quality of the service and the services, which they offer. The aim of this study was the attempt to develop methodology for comparative scoring evaluation of social-economic and recreational resources for 30 countries and dependent territories of the world. The relevance of this issue is due to current trends of growth of demand of consumers of tour- ist services at a unique, specific, safe and high-standard direction. Located away from mass tourist flows, or in the shadow of world-renowned destinations possessing significant recreational potential, dependent countries and territories may offer a fundamentally new tourism product for the domestic market. For com- parative characteristics and evaluation of social-economic tourist and recreational resources of dependent countries the authors developed a scoring matrix that includes seven indicators, each of which is graded on a scale. According to the results of integrated assessment, all analyzed dependent countries and territories are united in five groups - with low, middle-low, medium, medium-high and high characteristics of tourist- recreational resources. Almost all of the analyzed territories offer a wide range of tourist and entertainment services. Anguilla, Aruba, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, French Polynesia are different with particularly developed infrastructure.