COOPERATION OF TOURIST DESTINATIONS OF THE REGION SLAVONIA SITUATED BY THE RIVER SAVA IN MARKETING AREA

The tourist destination "My beautiful Slavonia near Sava" was established in May 2015 within the framework of the project of the Croatian Tourist Board "365 Croatia", with the aim of creating authentic and attractive value-added tourism products that can be placed on the market throughout the year. The agreement on cooperation was then signed by 20 units of local self-government from the Brodsko-Posayska and Vukovarsko-Srijemska counties which gravitate to the river Sava, and within the same, cultural and gastronomic area defined as key product groups, and Munich and Vienna as two key geo-zones. The mentioned marketing concept of promotion of the period before and after the tourist season expired in June 2018, but the cities and municipalities in the Destination renewed the cooperation agreement in September 2018 for the next three years, this time under the name Tourist destination "My beautiful Slavonia near Sava", and with a reduced number of bodies and a simpler decision-making process. Under the conditions in which the Croatian Tourist Board allocates funds to improve activities of the tourist communities in the tourist underdeveloped areas exclusively to the tourist communities of individual counties, also in the case of the implementation of a particular program/project in several tourist areas, we conducted a primary research in the form of a questionnaire to determine if the cities and municipalities, as well as tourist entities from the area of the Destination, had interest to cooperate, regardless of the adverse effect of the mentioned external factors (threats). The results of the research will serve tourism communities and units of local self-government networked in the Destination, although belonging to the different administrative units, to plan and implement the joint activities on tourism development.