MORE THAN 1.6 million foreign visitors stayed in accommodation facilities in Slovakia last year, which represents a rise of 7.3 percent in annual terms, representatives of the Slovak Association of Travel Agencies (SACKA) informed on May 27.
The increase is due to a hike in the quality and range of services in tourism. “It’s becoming clear that support for tourism through subsidies to regional and local tourism associations is yielding fruit,” SACKA head Stanislav Macko said, as quoted by the TASR newswire. “The subsidies make it possible to raise the quality of the services and thereby help increase satisfaction among visitors to a particular destination.”
Czech tourists were the most numerous (approximately 492,000), followed by roughly 167,000 Polish vacationers and 153,000 Germans. When it comes to organised trips, Slovak travel agencies provided stays for 170,000 foreign visitors in Slovakia last year.
Moreover, Slovaks increasingly spend their holidays in Slovakia and do so several times a year. The number of Slovak tourists who used accommodation facilities rose by 3.9 percent year-on-year in 2013 to 2.3 million. Organised tourism served 59,000 Slovak visitors, or a 3.9-percent rise in annual terms.
Some 560,000 Slovaks went abroad for their holiday and relied on the services of a travel agency last year. Most interest was seen in air travel, most prominently to Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece. As far as trips involving coach and individual transport, 230,000 Slovaks travelled in this way to Croatia and Italy.
(Source: TASR)
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
