NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS AND TOURISM: DIFFERENCES IN ATTITUDES ABOUT TOURISM IMPACTS IN COASTAL AND CONTINENTAL TOURISM DESTINATIONS

Stakeholder attitudes about tourism are often the focus of observation for both practitioners and researchers. However, while the attitudes of some stakeholders have been researched and studied from a variety of perspectives, some stakeholder groups remain unjustly absent from the focus of mainstream research. One such stakeholder group is non-profit organizations as important actors in civil society. This research focuses on non-profit organizations (NPOs) as one of the stakeholders in tourism and examines the attitudes of members (more specifically, management representatives) of NPOs towards tourism, distinguishing NPOs in relation to the city, i.e., their region: continent or coast. Furthermore, using the same differentiation criterion, this study relates attitudes toward tourism to the level of annual income of NPOs and the assessment of their own financial situation. For this purpose, an online survey was conducted among a sample of members of assemblies of non-profit organisations operating in the most developed coastal and continental tourism destinations in Croatia. The results show that there are significant differences in attitudes toward the cultural and economic impacts of tourism between associations operating in coastal areas and associations operating in continental areas, while there are no significant differences in attitudes toward the environmental impacts of tourism.