General model of small entrepreneurship development in tourism destinations in Croatia

Abstract

Small tourist enterprises on the local level lack favourable and «friendly» business environment which would enable larger investments in increasing the quality of their products, strengthening the market position of its products, optimal use of resources and specialisation, which would create pre-requisites for generation of new added values, in order to to achieve a more respectable market position, which has been seriously threatened by large corporations as a result of globalisation rise. Competitiveness of local small entrepreneurs in tourist destinations which operate in the global business environment will increasingly depend on the ability to co-operate and form partnerships on the local level. Competitiveness of any tourist destination in relation to others will in the future depoend on the effectiveness of its tourist clusters. The main aim of this paper is to show how can tourism cluster of small entrepreneurs be possible model for small entrepreneurship development in tourist destinations in Croatia and how it can increase its competitiveness (case of Labin-Rabac tourist destination). The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of clustering in the tourism sector, and highlight key advantages and benefits of establishing tourist cluster for its cluster members and tourist destination. Basic hypotesis: pooling of small entrepreneurs into tourism clusters is the base of the most efficient way to achieve future development of tourist destinations in order to achieve more competitive tourism.