Tourism clusters identification procedure and specifics

This paper intended to show the scope and complexity of the tourism clusters problem. Processes of clusters formation and functioning are of great interest for researchers in Russian Federation and abroad, especially considering governments' activity in this sphere. Key problems are as follows: Which economic activities have to be included in tourism cluster as supplementary? What are the problems of their turnover estimation? What are the criteria of tourism cluster formation? All of them have a long history, but currently are still far from being solved, among other things, we still need to calculate a share of complementary industries' sales and resources to be included in tourism activity and «wild» tourism turnover estimation. We propose to run a specialized survey to assess the economic effects of non-organized tourism to solve these problems. In terms of theory, it remains to be determined, what are criteria for local group of firms in tourism and complementary activities that make them arrange into a cluster considering the economic benefits of geographical concentration in certain location. Widely used procedure of cluster maturity estimation was applied to Russian Federation regions in comparison with world-class tourist clusters in Europe. We got an evidence of biases in cluster identification because of country and type of tourism specifics as well as limitations of estimating procedure. The paper shows that these problems are typical for not only Russian Federation but foreign countries too, including those with well-developed tourism industry. Clusters influence at companies efficiency is at least contradictory both from the side of demand and supply. Tourist product, resources and business processes specifics makes it much harder to extract cluster benefits and gives privileges first to large companies.