Perception of tourist products by destination management with an emphasis on monitoring quality and sustainability

Fast development in tourism results in changes in the creation of tourism products. Tourism as a sector has been the one belonging o he most affected sectors in the recent period (Covid-19 pandemic) and many business entities in tourism had to close their operations. Strong players and allies, on the other hand, proceeded to reassess their strategies and create tourism products. Destination management organizations represented entities that created strong alliances in the region, stimulated the creation of new and re-evaluation (modification) of existing tourism products offered within Slovak destinations. The aim of the study, which was carried out on destination management organizations in Slovak destinations, was to find out how destination management organizations perceive quality and sustainability in the creation of products within tourist destinations in Slovakia. The main method of data collection was a questionnaire, in which the questions were designed using a Likert scale. The obtained data were evaluated for descriptive statistics and established hypotheses used the Wilcoxon and Mann -Whitney tests. The main findings include that destination management organizations perceive the quality of tourism products as essential and the demand an automatic part of tourism products. This finding also confirms the acceptance of the hypothesis, which proved the connection between the process of creating the quality of tourism products, which should be long-term, and the requirement for their sustainability. However, it is interesting to note that sustainability in tourism is not understood in the same way by business entities in tourism. This not only points to the importance of the presented study, but also gives it direction for the future.