This study uses an innovative tourism product development approach, based on co-creation or customer involvement, related to Lake Balaton, a mass tourism-based destination in Hungary, from the point of view of the market segment of active cycling tourists. The investigation of opportunities for the development of cycling tourism first of all relies on the new approach of attraction and product development around the destination, in which it is important to take into consideration the consumer preferences of the most important related group of tourists—active cycling tourists. The sustainable approach of tourism product development also provides an opportunity to decrease the spatial and temporal concentration of tourism, which is largely concentrated on the summertime season. The aim of this study is to explore aspects of the customers’ demand for tourism development in terms of cycling tourism with the help of primary data collection, in order to provide adequate directions for sustainable tourism development in the destination. Revealing the demand side of active cycling tourism related to Lake Balaton, the authors used both qualitative (focus group discussions and structured interviews) and quantitative questionnaire survey (computer-assisted data collection) research methods. The latter online surveys were carried out in November and December, 2019, and resulted with an appraisable sample of 809 questionnaires. As for the method, descriptive statistics and relationship analyses were applied. More than five thousand (5050) possible relationships were examined between the closed answers of the questionnaire by Kendall’s rank correlation coefficient (τ) and Cramer’s V, depending on whether they could be measured on a nominal or ordinal scale. The results show that the content analysis of the primary research provides well determined directions for the sustainable tourism development of cycling tourism at Lake Balaton, so customer involvement seems to be a win-win situation both for the customers (tourists) and the decision makers.

One of the leading tourism products of Hungary is health tourism, where the certain supply segments are influenced by seasonality in different scales. The primary aim of our paper is to survey the seasonality of the 9 spas with the greatest turnover in Hungary with the help of the Gini index. Our research intends to provide an actual picture about the exact measure of seasonality in the highlighted spas of Hungary, due to the overall actuality of the problem and also because no such relevant quantitative research has been dealing with this issue in Hungary yet. The objective reason why these spas were chosen and surveyed is because first of all they are mono profile health tourism centres, where tourists are visiting the settlement exclusively because of the spas, and on the other hand the visitor turnover of the mentioned settlements are significantly higher than the following Hungarian spa towns. We believe that the more we understand seasonality the more we can face with its challenges concerning tourism development. For our seasonality analysis we used the commercial accommodation statistics of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office and to estimate the Gini index we applied the monthly dataset of the guest nights.

Turisztikai és Vidékfejlesztési Tanulmányok Folyóirat

Turisztikai és Vidékfejlesztési Tanulmányok Folyóirat

The study aims to reveal the evaluation of quality of life (QOL) factors of the local residents and the owners of the second homes from a regional perspective. As a case study we analyse the second most important tourism destination of Hungary, Lake Balaton in terms of evaluation of quality of life and living space within the scope of three target groups, two groups of local residents (who live there and work there, and who live there but work elsewhere) and the owners of second homes. The authors believe that the understanding of the decisive factors of quality of life and living space is becoming increasingly important in the successful management of local governments and in the field of sustainable tourism development and tourism management as well. The authors also intend to detect and understand the differences between the target groups. One of the most important results of the article is the creation of an aggregated settlement quality of life (QOL) indicator. The research observes both objective and subjective factors based on a primary questionnaire survey conducted in 2018 resulting from a sample of 844 respondents. The results are interpreted with crosstab, correlation and variance analysis.