Tourism development in the Slovak Republic after the global financial crisis

The aim of the article. This study aims to analyze tourism development in Slovakia after the global financial crisis to find the consequences of the global financial crisis on post-crisis tourism development.The results of the analysis. The dynamically changing contemporary world is rich in crisis and very competitive at the same time. While the global financial crisis has had a negative impact on tourism and destinations, competition continues to drive the industry onward. This paper aims to find consequences and relations between the economy and tourism industry in post-crisis tourism development in the Slovak Republic. The smooth partial least squares approach dependent on a parameter was applied, with the economy lagged situation in the data. An analysis of the original variables showed a positive relation among gross domestic product and consumer prices to the number of overnights, and a negative relation to the non-resident ratio and the length of stay parameter. In some sense, different conclusions are identified on the first differences compared to temporal relations and lags in original data. The share of the multivariate linear trend in the individual parameters was also quantified.More deeply, two multivariate statistical approaches are used within this study. The first multivariate method is principal component analysis with an extension based on inserting a linear trend. This arrangement gives us information about the average growth of individual input variables, as well as a representation of the whole data linear trend within the given time interval. The other method applied is partial least squares. A multilevel data topic is studied in the descriptive sense of similarity between individual profiles. The relationships between sets of economy and tourism industry variables are examined in the singular values points of zero lag, as well as in the lag close to maximum association, considering the interval excluding the local minimum values in the convex path of individual output.An increased number of non-residents and length of stay are negatively related to consumer prices in the original data, considering also the distance of individual values from mean and processed by smooth partial least squares. Given by the parameter considering the non-resident share, overnight stays seem to be supported by gross domestic product, as predominantly supplied by Slovak residents. For the first differenced data, the opposite association of consumer prices to the length of stay property survives in both zero lag and delayed tourism data. It is important to note that the economy year-to-year changes are more related to length of stay and not to overnights or the non-resident ratio in the zero lag data.In the score processes, the significant changes, especially considering the tourism lagged data of 2014, outlined the potential for a future tourism shift in Slovakia, where the corresponding tourism parameters are more spread than economy ones.Encompassing the tourism data, no significant multivariate linear trend was identified. Rather, it was found that at increased levels of overnights and non-resident share, the pattern of relations is revealed to shorten the length of stay in such a situation.Conclusions and directions of further researches. Development of the Slovak tourism market is connected with the progress of the domestic markets, the tourism strategy, tourism policy and the use of efficient methods for the management of tourism growth. Tourism in Slovakia is suffering from the lack of a long-term and sustainable policy. The result of this process is uneven development of the domestic and foreign tourism markets.Tourism in the Slovak Republic has recorded dynamic changes since the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993. In the structure of markets and their redistribution within the country, the Czech Republic is still one of the most important source markets for Slovakia, and vice versa. Opportunities for future research can be seen in a comparison of post-crisis tourism development in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.