The Impact of the Hotel Industry on the Competitiveness of Tourism Destinations in Hungary

This paper focuses on a complex question from the perspective of the hotel industry. It tries to draw attention to the importance of hotels, enhancing it on the basis of the tourism destination competitiveness models and introducing the role and place of the hotel industry in the most important models. The hotel industry research evaluates the most important tourism destinations of Hungary on the micro-regional level that justifies the importance and contribution of the hotels and accommodations to competitiveness and success of tourism destinations with exact results. As a result of the research, the micro-regional destinations can be ranged within three groups in Hungary. In the first group of the most developed and most competitive tourism destinations, the hotel industry plays a very important role. In these regions, the hotel industry has a significant effect not only on competitiveness of tourism but also on general development of the regions. In the second group, which can be still called tourism destination, tourism and the hotel industry both play a significant role, but only the competitiveness of tourism can be considered good, the effects of the tourism on general development of the region can be proved only to a lesser extent. In the third group, the effects of tourism and the hotel industry can only be experienced to a lesser extent. The majority of these regions are not considered to be attractive tourism destinations for tourists any more.