CREATING A CITY BRAND AS A TOURIST DESTINATION IN THE SELECTED COUNTRIES OF ADRIATIC REGION

This article examines and analyses the perception of 270 respondents (residents, tourists, tourist organizations) on the strength of the city's brand as a tourist destination in the selected countries of the former Yugoslavia: Montenegro, Croatia, and Slovenia The subject of the study is Adriatic cities (Kotor in Montenegro, Dubrovnik in Croatia, and Porotroz in Slovenia. It is interesting not only to assess the city's brand as a tourist destination by selected countries but also to assess the difference between these three countries, and to achieve the knowledge about factors of influence. We started with the hypothesis that the following six factors: presence, place, pre-requisites, people, pulse, and potential in a certain degree had a direct and dominant impact on the creation of the city's brand as a tourist destination in the observed countries. We used both qualitative and quantitative techniques in our research. The initial hypothesis has been fully verified using a linear and multiple regression analysis. In addition, it has been shown that linear dependence explains well the studied functional dependencies and that the author correctly identified key independent variables (factors), which significantly impacted the dependent variable.