successful case to support the tourism industry was presented at the XI Eurasian Event Forum

It was organized by the exhibition research center R&C. The event started with the session “Accelerators as the main industry trend of the 21st century”, where representatives of the Moscow City Tourism Committee spoke about the successful experience of implementing the Moscow Travel Factory accelerator, an industry accelerator program within the framework of the Moscow Travel Hub project. 

Already For two years in a row, the program brings together the best start-ups in the field of tourism, helps them reach a new level of their development and become part of the city's tourism industry. In total, 60 startups left the accelerator, which continue to develop their projects aimed at improving the user experience of tourists in Moscow. At the same time, as noted by the Moscow Travel Hub during the EFEA session, in addition to supporting small businesses, Moscow Travel Factory has become an element of assistance to the classic tourism industry: the organizers paid much attention to networking between accelerator participants and hotels, tour operators, display objects, aggregators and guides. More than 50 companies from the tourism business became partners of the program. For start-ups, this is a chance to express themselves and find partners, and for the tourism industry - to pilot solutions without costs or minimizing them.

It is noteworthy that, despite the seemingly difficult time in tourism, start-ups are predominantly specifically for business, which indicates that the demand for new solutions in the industry continues to exist.

At the end of the speech, the organizers of the Moscow Travel Factory named three components of a successful accelerator. The first is to gather a strong pool of trackers, partners and investors. The second is to pay great attention to networking during the accelerator. The third is a high-quality educational program and effective speakers. In addition, it is important to definitely make a large-scale demo day, which, on the one hand, is a driver for startups to actively participate in the accelerator so that they are allowed to speak, and on the other hand, their dress rehearsal for all subsequent speeches to potential partners, investors, negotiations and presentations themselves to society.

Also during the session, Olga Shandurenko (head of the program for the development of industrial tourism, ASI) spoke about their experience in organizing an accelerator; Valentin Shumovsky (co-founder of the Association "International Association of Business Trackers" from St. Petersburg); Sergey Ryzhov (CEO and founder of MICE Market Agency for Business Tourism and Events, PromTourism.ru project from Samara).

The participants of the discussion agreed that although accelerators are a global trend, Russia, in terms of their creation, follows its own path, which differs from the Western model; here, its own types of acceleration programs appear, adapted for Russian business. It is important that all these programs solve the main task: creating new products for the Russian market and helping small businesses to implement their ideas.