Natural healing resources in the form of mineral and thermal waters and climatic conditions, together with a rich history and modern medical procedures, rank Slovakia among the important European countries in the field of spas. At the same time, spa tourism has a significant economic benefit for the country. This study examined the impact of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on spa tourism in Slovakia. The Box-Jenkins methodology was used to model and forecast the time series for selected indicators. The analysis used monthly data on the capacity and performance of spa facilities for 2006–2019 and compared the forecast development for 2020–2021 with the reality as affected by the pandemic. Despite the high quality of the models, the methodology used did not take into account an unexpected event such as a pandemic. Therefore, the models were quite inaccurate and had little predictive value. At the same time, it is clear that the pandemic significantly affected spa tourism.

Customer reviews represent an important aspect when choosing accommodation from the customer’s point of view. The customer assumes that if the facility has a higher number of positive reviews from other customers, his experience with the services of the selected accommodation will be similar. This paper focuses on the importance of customer reviews of accommodation facilities in the context of V4 countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). The aim of the paper was to analytically evaluate customer reviews of accommodation facilities in V4 countries as an important factor in the selection and reservation of accommodation services, such as gastronomic services, accommodation and additional services. We focused primarily on examining the differences in customer evaluations of accommodation facilities in these V4 countries. The findings highlight the importance of positive and negative reviews in influencing guest satisfaction and loyalty. At the end of the paper, we offer recommendations for accommodation facilities that are focused on positive as well as negative reviews.

The Slovak Republic is a country of a deeply rooted Catholic religion and rich cultural, religious and craft tradition. The authors, in their own research, primarily focus on a group of pilgrims, believers, mostly Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic, who are inhabitants of the Slovak Republic (not necessarily the region in which the object of interest is located). The research is based on geographic and sociological selection. The authors define the research object as cultural and historical secular monuments—museums, castles, chateaux, and the like—located in the centre attractive for this group of tourists, that is to say, in places connected with pilgrimage sites, cathedrals, historically important objects from the point of view of religious belief in individual regions of the Slovak Republic. The aim of the authors is to provide the management of these objects with valuable recommendations reasonably justified by the result of their research, in the context of attracting the target group to visit a selected cultural object not directly related to the tourist activity of the target group, but located in the region of which the target group expresses a strong interest, solely for reasons of religious belief and pilgrimage. The primary research phase target of the authors was to solve the problem of the existence of a specific spectrum of common dominant motivation factors of pilgrimage tourist participation as a target group of exploration of activities and an offer of secular objects in the region (see Materials and Methods, H1). We analysed the results of our research through the SPSS program. We used the factor analysis method to extract the key motivation factors, and we have extracted key factors using principal component analysis and VARIMAX rotation in the right-angle system (rotated solution), clusters, assuming that each corresponds to one of the expected motivation factors. Detailed research conception and methodology as well as the results are described in the article.

Youth travel is an important segment of the tourism market. The motives of travel as we knew them until 2020 were more or less constant, but the pandemic situation had a huge impact on the interest in travel. For this reason, it is important to test the reaction of young people to current pandemics in the tourism market and their current attitudes and views on travel. This chapter deals with changes in consumer behavior on the example of Slovak youth, based on the implemented qualitative research on a sample of more than 300 Slovak youths who participate in tourism activities. The aim was to identify changes in consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, their motivations, and barriers to travel. The results of the empirical part bring clear conclusions that the pandemic significantly affected the interest, purchase, and overall behavior of youth in the context of travel.