Many stakeholders believe that developing community-based ecotourism (CBET) in vulnerable nature reserves is an effective method of ensuring greater conservation of natural and cultural resources, empowering host communities, and improving their socio-economic well-being. This paper assesses the current status of the CBET development in the Aksu-Jabagly nature reserve (NR), located in the south part of Kazakhstan. In order to understand ecotourism development status, 222 representative households from two neighboring communities of Aksu-Jabagly NR were surveyed with 5-point Likert scale questions. At the same time, two tourism relevant experts were interviewed. The results of examining the three indicators (community tourism relevance, community participation rank, and community empowerment), showed that the neighboring community relevance with the tourism in AksuJabagly NR was low, the community residents' participation rank in tourism was also at the lower level, and the community’s empowerment status is not ideal. As a result, we initially asserted that the status of CBET development in Aksu-Jabagly NR is not well, in particular, the positive economic and social impact of tourism development is not so obvious.

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Tourism is one of the main sources of income in many countries; even some states depend highly on the tourism industry at present. The main purpose of tourism business activities is to create competitive tourist products in the international market. Achievement of these aims requires the development of the governmental regulation system, support of the tourism industry, the usage of promotion methods of tourism products. The article presents and assesses the state of development of the most necessary tourism products for the development of the tourism industry on the example of Aksa-Jabagly Nature Reserve in Kazakhstan. The results of the study show that if we consider the development level of the four most important tourist products, such as accommodation, transportation, tourist attractions and electronic service, then we can say that the level of their development and the conditions for providing quality services to tourists are relatively good according to the three previous indicators. Based on the analysis of the quality of electronic services in the field of research (the main criteria: telephone signal, Internet speed, electronic tickets, etc.), we found that the level of eservice development in this region is low, despite the fact that Kazakhstan has the potential of using highquality internet coverage in its current development status.