Dušan Borovčanin

This study explores the role of community-centered farm-based hospitality in promoting sustainable rural development, with a focus on South Tyrol, Italy. A survey of 461 local residents assessed perceptions of agritourism’s impact on agricultural heritage, environmental sustainability, and community well-being. Factor analysis identified two main constructs—Agroheritage Sustainability and Empowered Eco-Tourism—which together capture the multifaceted benefits of agritourism. Agroheritage Sustainability reflects the preservation of traditional farming practices, cultural landscapes, and intergenerational knowledge, emphasizing the role of tourism in maintaining cultural identity and preventing land abandonment. Empowered Eco-Tourism highlights the socio-economic benefits of sustainable tourism, including community empowerment, environmental stewardship, and the creation of new economic opportunities. The study’s findings indicate that local residents view agritourism as a holistic approach that supports rural livelihoods while preserving cultural heritage and promoting ecological resilience. The analysis further supports the potential of farm-based hospitality as a model for sustainable rural development, aligning closely with EU policies and global best practices. The Roter Hahn initiative in South Tyrol serves as a practical example of this approach, demonstrating the value of certification programs in enhancing transparency, quality, and sustainability. These insights provide valuable guidance for policymakers and tourism developers seeking to promote sustainable rural tourism globally. The contribution of this research lies in its empirical validation of a dual-construct model that links community engagement with agroecological and cultural sustainability, offering a transferable framework for evaluating agritourism as a lever for sustainable rural development in diverse regional contexts.

The aim of this study was to illustrate the importance of major sports events, such as marathons, and their economic impact on hotel performance during these unpredictable times for the events and tourism industry. The analysis was focused on the economic impact of the marathon event on hotel performance in the area hosting the race. For that purpose, we selected the Vienna City Marathon, held yearly in April, as a case. We hypothesized that there will be a higher impact of hotel performance a day prior to the marathon in regard to the hotel performance in multiple nonmarathon occasions. As indicators for hotel performance we have chosen hotel occupancy, revenue per available room, average daily rate and total revenue recorded for: day (always Saturday) prior to the marathon, year average, April average and average Saturday in April. Results from this study revealed significant effects of a marathon on three major hotel performance indicators (i.e., hotel occupancy, revenue per available room and total revenue). Findings from this study could serve the local government or event planners after the current crisis to justify financial investments in hosting a marathon or similar sports events for restarting tourism.

Job satisfaction is correlated with employees on job performance, guest satisfaction and implicitly with financial performance of a hotel

Revenue management (RM) is a technique used in hospitality for over 3 decades. North American corporate hotel chains have started to implement RM principles already in the early '80s of the last century [13]. The basic principles of RM are dynamic pricing in which demand forecasting is having a major role. Today, almost 40 years after the introduction of RM, specific markets still have not implemented successfully the RM principles in their daily operations nor on a strategic level. In this paper, the research was conducted looking at the pricing strategy of Serbian hotels from 2013 to the end of 2017. The Serbian market is a rapidly growing tourism market as it records higher growth rates than the European and global average. However, Serbia is still an emerging market concerning the overall level of tourism development. Results of the research show that Serbian hotel managers manage their rates monthly, while RM on a weekly or a daily basis is used very little. Besides time management in pricing strategy, the research shows that the price is dominantly influenced by room supply, which is, as it was shown in the research, very static in comparison to demand. Simply said, hotels in Serbia pay more attention to the room supply rather than room demand. Furthermore, results from the research reveal that the market is witnessing a strong decrease in average daily rate (ADR). However, the drop in ADR is still leading to an overall increase in total revenue. Yet, tourism demand demonstrated significant intervals of price in elasticity where potential revenue was lost due to inadequate pricing policy. Therefore, we argue that the wider application of RM principles is necessary in order to maximize favourable trends of arrivals and overnights that Serbia has been recording in the last 10 years.

Customer satisfaction with service quality is one of the fundamental goals of hotel enterprises. Numerous specifics of hotel services (intangibility, inability to storage, etc.) make this goal hard to reach, and thus hotels invest enormous efforts in identification of guests' needs, in order to adjust their supply. The aim of this paper is to identify weaknesses and advantages of the selected hotel attributes by analysis of guests' importance and performance evaluation. The respondents were accommodated in four and five-star hotels in Serbia. In order to identify the weak points that could enable managers to raise the quality of services, the IPA method (Importance-Performance Analysis) was used. The results obtained reveal that guests are generally satisfied with the hotel attributes they consider highly important, while it is not the case with those less important. Furthermore, certain differences could be observed between the guests who stayed in city hotels and those in mountain and spa hotels.

Globalizacija i neoliberalni pristup u svetskoj ekonomiji potisnuo je privredna društva u sve veću konkurenciju

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the extent to which information and communication technologies (ICT) are used in the analysis of satisfaction of hotel guests in Serbia