(Source: http://za-no-za.net)

The participants of the "round table" under the meaningful name "Tourism and Culture: The Prospects of Cooperation" held as a part of the VI St. Petersburg International Workshop noted: due to the reduction in the number of "organized" tourists groups even the well-known museums lose their visitors.

The State Hermitage Museum, one of the most popular museums in the country and in Europe, was visited by nearly 2.9 million people in 2011; over 918 thousand of them were foreign citizens. And more than 81 thousand were the companies’ representatives accompanying the tourists.

The results of 2012 are more modest: about 2.8 million people visited the museum complex last year, but the number of foreigners among them was much smaller - only 850 people (65% of them were from 5 countries – and only 23% from the U.S.).

Although the number of the organized foreign tourists visiting the museum has grown more than threefold over the last 10 years, the alarming signs have appeared recently: the number of individual tourists, who sometimes come in order to visit a certain exhibition or exposition, has grown. Despite the fact that previously these tourists were few, now they make up about 12% of the total amount. And their number is increasing. The reducing trend in the number of organized tourists and the upward trend to the growth of the share of individual tourists are both familiar to the representatives of tourist business.

Many of tourists nowadays are not satisfied with visiting the well-known and traditional museums - they need something new. Now, when tourism is becoming more and more individual, the winner is the company that offers the programs of visits aimed at the modern people: cultural institutions as well as travel companies need to look for new ways of work with tourists.