Definition of alternative tourist availability and its mapping

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The purpose of the article is to justify approaches to assessing alternative tourist availability (using the example of Cherkasy region and its first-order neighbors) according to the authors’ indicators and their cartographic support. The main material. The article analyses prevailing approaches to the assessment of tourist destinations, their tourist potential. The authors have found that it is not enough to evaluate the territory itself as it functions and develops in constant competition with neighbours and territories that provide similar tourist services. The need for a traveller to choose a tourist destination between several mutually exclusive possibilities gives rise to the definition of an alternative place of rest. The article proposes to evaluate a comprehensive indicator - alternative tourist accessibility, based on the system of indicators of geographical location, infrastructural, natural-recreational, historical-cultural factors in accordance with territorial, practical, price, and informational accessibility, which is understood as a comparative assessment of territories according to specified criteria using a rating approach, geo-informational - the cartographic method and the sum of places method. Approbation of the methodology was carried out on the example of Cherkasy region and its neighbours of the first order, as they can pull off potential tourist flows most often or, conversely, act as a donor of potential tourists. Conclusions and further research. Based on the results of the study, the tourist leader is Kyiv region. Cherkasy region ranks second, losing in terms of territorial, informational and practical accessibility. The third place takes the territory of Poltava region, which is the main competitor for Cherkasy region, especially taking into account the similarity of tourist products. The main advantage of Cherkasy region in determining an alternative place of rest is affordability as the strongest competitive factor. Thus, the evaluation results confirm the present -day depiction of tourism development. We believe that such an indicator must be taken into account while developing tourism strategies and SWOT-analyses, because it allows us to identify prospects and threats, weaknesses and strengths. In the future, this method should be tested on the example of regions that are competitors for a certain type of tourist offer.