The Mystical Tourism: the Essence and Prospects for Development in Lviv Region

Abstract

Mystical tourism is not very common in Ukraine, but is an innovative instrument and a new promising direction to improve the tourist appeal of Ukraine, including Lviv region and the city of Lviv. The article analyzes the possibilities and prospects for the development of mystical tourism in Ukraine on the example of Lviv region. It is identified that Lviv region has a significant number of known mystical places and objects, the considerable «mystical» potential, which should be developed, as it will bring additional money income to the country’s economy, increase the tourist flow and develop related sectors of the economy. The theoretical aspects of the development of mystical tourism as a kind of «dark» tourism are covered and its specific features are allocated. Based on research on the approaches of scientists, an authors’ own vision of the interpretation of the concept of «mystical tourism» is proposed. The tendencies of the tourism development in Lviv region and the prerequisites for the development of mystical tourism as such are analyzed. According to the results of the research, a plan of the most popular mystical places of Lviv region is developed by marking them on a map with a distribution by the number of search queries in the web service Google Trends. A comparative analysis of the proposals of tours of mystical nature by the tourism companies of Lviv and Kyiv is carried out. A number of events to popularize mystical tourism in Lviv region is proposed.

Keywords

• tourism
• mystical tourism
• «dark» tourism
• mystical objects
• mystical places
• a map of mystical places