Tourist Potential of Slovakia: Realized Opportunities, Prospects of Increasing the Efficiency of Use

The article is devoted to the consideration of the current state of tourism potential in Slovakia and analysis of opportunities to increase its efficiency for the development of the tourist market of the country. Analysis of the tourist potential of Slovakia showed that the industry is rapidly developing due to the presence of unique natural recreational, historical and cultural resources in the country. However, due to insufficiently high level of service, undeveloped tourism infrastructure, the country is not able to realize its potential. In order to achieve higher growth rates in the tourism industry, Slovakia needs to realize a set of long-term and short-term goals, identify key markets, adapt the tourist product to world-class, stabilize the tourism market and get new markets for existing tourist products. In order to reveal the topic, a number of techniques used for geographic and economic sciences are used: methods of analysis, systematic, dialectical, economic-comparative, geographic-economic. The purpose of this work is to explore the tourism potential of Slovakia and to determine the possibilities of increasing its efficiency in building the tourism market of the country. It is shown that individual programs of the tourist market development of the country have been successfully implemented successfully today. Thanks to the public-private partnership, the country has created quite favorable conditions for the development of both organized international and domestic tourism, as well as for independent travel. According to the tourism development rating, Slovakia is an absolute leader on such indicators as the gross domestic product per capita, the share of tourism in GDP, the number of foreign tourist trips, as well as the place in the competitiveness rating of the tourism sector of the country. Based on the research conducted on the effectiveness of the country's tourism potential, a SWOT-analysis of the tourism industry was carried out.