ROLE OF RURAL TOURISM FOR DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL AREAS

The paper analyse the role of rural tourism for the development of rural areas, on the comparison of two regions with different types of rural tourism. One area is of highly diversified rural tourism with wide range of tourist products (rafting, hiking, cycling, farm tourism, skiing.). The tourism offer in the second area is much more uniform (mainly farm tourism and some spa). The study analysed how the two different types of tourist product diversifications influence the development possibilities of studied rural areas. We analysed how different systems are able to maintain its functions in the context of identified perturbations (socio-economic and geophysical). We analysed the influence of different factors on systems stability, its resilience, robustness and integrity. The gained results show that only the higher level of diversification is not a guarantee for systems higher stability, resilience, robustness and integrity, but there also other factor which influence the outcome as: size of the area, diversity of actors involved, type of governance.