Abstract
For many regions and communes, the development of tourism offers opportunities for economic revival, the stimulation of local entrepreneurship and, as a result, increased budget revenues. Before such objectives can be successfully pursued, however, it is necessary to carefully consider to what degree the conditions present in a particular area are conducive to the development of tourism there, including its tourism resources and the existing state of development. This study analyzes the attractiveness of the seven communes making up Brzeski County (Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland) for tourism and recreation. The potential of the communes in this largely rural county was characterized using Gołembski’s index, based on multivariate comparative analysis, assessing the natural and man-made features and the degree of development of each of the communes. This analysis was further complemented using Wejchert’s impression curve, assessing visual attractiveness along selected routes in two of the communes. Of the seven communes analyzed, the Commune of Brzesko was found to have the most extensively developed services, hotel and food-service infrastructure, to be home to many historic buildings and to have a relatively high municipal budget. The Commune of Iwkowa, in turn, which scored lowest in terms of Gołembski’s index (mainly due to its underdeveloped infrastructure, few historic buildings and the fact that it is crossed by a major transit route), was nevertheless found to score significantly higher than Brzesko in terms of Wejchert’s impression curve. These findings confirm that the beauty of the landscape is not always well correlated with tourism development potential. We conclude that such a combination of methods should to be applied to reliably and comprehensively evaluate the relative attractiveness of different parts of a given region for tourism and recreation, for instance so as to inform planning decisions and the allocation of funding.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralSince the start of the 21st century, the tourism industry has experienced a worldwide boom which continues to the present day—setting aside the exceptional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic [1,2]
Territorial administration in Poland is a three-tier system consisting of 16 provinces or voivodships, which are subdivided into counties, which in turn are further subdivided into communes
While recognizing that any such system of weights carries an inherent degree of subjectivity, we modeled our weights very closely on the weighting system used in Gołembski [15]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralSince the start of the 21st century, the tourism industry has experienced a worldwide boom which continues to the present day—setting aside the exceptional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic [1,2]. Significant growth in tourism is not possible everywhere, only in locations which are deemed worth visiting by significant numbers of people. Evaluating a region’s attractiveness to tourism, involves assessing which of its natural and man-made resources can, and do, successfully draw people’s attention and attract visitors as well as tourism-industry investors [5,6,7]. Such evaluations provide information that is useful in a range of decisions regarding planning, funding allocation, etc. In Poland, the basic planning documents that are prepared at the lowest level of spatial planning (that of the gmina, or commune) are land-use studies, which are official documents with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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