Reengineering of Tourism Organization Structure: The Case of Slovakia

The transition of the Slovak economy to a market-driven has caused more changes also in the organizational structure of tourism on national, regional and local level. The aim of the paper is to analyse the current organizational structure of destination management in Slovakia, the activities and financing of the destination management organizations (DMOs) and to evaluate the impact of state subsidies on tourism development in Slovakia. The majority of governmental subsidies are given to destinations with the highest developed infrastructure and the newly introduced Act no. 91/2010 Coll. about the support of tourism in Slovakia itself contributes to the deepening of regional disparities. The micro-regional DMOs are up to now financed mainly from the state budget and in case, that the funding from the government will be decreased, it is still the question of the sustainability of newly created DMOs. The Slovak DMOs should try to focus more on the increase of the revenues from their own activities, but this solution is limited by existing act, they should try to get more members or the other possibility is the merger of existing micro-regional DMOs into larger organizations covering the larger territory. According to the results of the analysis based on the research of task and resources, size and dominance, the paper proposes new geographical distribution of the micro-regional DMOs on the territory of 8 self-government regions.