Digital Capacity of Russian Tourist Territories

Abstract

Digitalization has affected the economies and the everyday life of the population all around the globe. Industries are going digital with the Industry 4.0 mode changing the conventional practices of doing business. People spend a significant amount of time online shifting their daily routines to electronic format. The wide dissemination and adoption of ICTs place mutual expectations from the population to have competence in using modern digital technologies and from firms and public institutions to provide their services online. Not surprisingly there is a strong digital divide between territories in their digital capacity – the ability of a territory to generate digital content. This study is aimed at evaluating the digital capacity of cities and municipalities in Russia by measuring their digital footprint in the tourism industry. Tourism is found to be an information - intensive economy sector with a large volume of consumer-generated content making it ideal for measuring the digital capacity of territories. The research design is based on geotagged hashtags sourced from Instagram – one of the most popular social networks worldwide. The geographical scope of research covers 205 cities in 10 regions of Russia – Arkhangelsk region (14 municipalities), the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol (19 municipalities), Kaliningrad region (28 municipalities), Krasnodar region (26 municipalities), Leningrad region (69 municipalities), Murmansk region (16 municipalities), and Rostov region (23 municipalities). All of the regions are located in the European part of the country but differ in environmental, socio-economic, and geopolitical parameters. In order to focus on the tourism sector, the dataset on tourist accommodation establishments and bed places is collected in addition to population statistics. The analyzed data is mapped, and a series of figures present the re search findings. The research results suggest that consumer-generated content with place-related hashtags in Instagram is applicable for tracking the tourism sector development and the tourism-related digital capacity of a territory. However, a number of limitations are identified in using user-generated digital content in social media. This includes overrepresentation of large cities over smaller settlements despite not being the direct location of reference; ‘noisy data’ featuring additional meaningless information due to ambiguous hashtags; an increasing volume of commercial posts from bloggers, self-employed, and business.