Sustainable Development of Tourist and Recreational Potential in the EU Countries

The paper deals with one of the relevant problems of the formation of the competitive tourist and recreational sphere of a region. The theoretical content of the tourist and recreational potential is specified. It is determined in the critical review that the content of potential depends on the level of development of the internal and external environments. The definition of the component composition allows identifying the valuation objects for which the calculated indicators can be generated. Using the EU countries as an example, the proposed approach to assessing the competitiveness index in the field of travel and tourism has been tested. It is shown that the methodological limitations of the traditional approach do not allow taking into account the influence of the productivity of infrastructural objects, their involvement in the creation of a quality tourist product. It was noted that the effective organization of destination management is of particular importance for the formation of sustainable tourism parameters. The analysis of the obtained results allowed concluding that the leading tourist regions of the EU are significantly differentiated, while the level of development of tourism does not depend on the scale of a territory.