ESOTERIC TOURISM AS A NICHE TYPE OF TOURISM: OPPORTUNITIES AND WAYS OF HUMAN SELF-IMPROVEMENT
Modern tourism is actively expanding the scope of its activities, including through the ever-increasing diversification and specialization of tourist trips and other products. Niche tourism is beginning to become an increasingly important sphere of tourism, annually giving a huge increase even in those areas that were traditionally considered massive. But there are also areas that have never been and can never be massive. These include esoteric tourism. Of course, there is an old tradition of pilgrimages and religious tourism, however, the concept of "esoteric" implies secret, sacred knowledge and skills that are passed on to some, a select few or, in the case of tourists, seeking them. The condition for obtaining this knowledge and skills is self-improvement and self-realization. As a result, esoteric tourism acts as a classic niche type of tourism. Its purpose as a type of tourism of special interests is self-improvement and self-realization as a motive of tourist activity. The purpose of the work is to study the state and prospects for the development of esoteric tourism as a special type of niche tourism, study the specifics of esoteric tourism as a type of niche tourism and identify the prospects for its development in Russia and the world. This type of tourism is intended for tourists with a special type of needs: in the context of A. Maslow's hierarchical model of needs, tourists who demand routes and other tourist offers of this type belong to a group of people who require a special quality of impressions about the world, and, most importantly, about themselves... The tourist travel of such tourists is the integration of health-recreational (healing), cultural and educational (philosophical and esoteric) and extreme mystical (spiritual, magical, shamanistic, etc.) travel. Self-improvement and selfrealization as a motive of tourist activity represent the highest level of motivation for tourist activity and, therefore, one way or another, should be understood as elite tourism, along with extreme tourism. This type of tourism has great development prospects precisely as a niche type of tourism, since it involves a person's work with oneself: the organization of such work requires significant efforts on his part and on the part of the organizers of a tourist trip, therefore, not only highly qualified specialists and special tourist destinations are needed, but also flexible, multicomponent routes, allowing to implement special customer requests so that this type of business remains not only in demand, but also competitive, along with its immanent elitism and other specifics.