Zeszyt naukowy - całość - Wydział ZarzÄ dzania i Ekonomiki Usług

Financing tourist information service… 95
3. Tourist information service in West Pomerania and Lake Balaton
West Pomerania
West Pomerania province is situated in North-West Poland and is the fifth
largest province in Poland. Since the province is endowed with many lakes, a long
stretch of the Baltic coast, the Odra and other rivers, it is considered by many Poles
as an attractive destination for a holiday. While there are numerous cultural attractions
in West Pomerania, tourist product is, nevertheless, based mainly on natural
attractions, which implies high spatial (most tourists visit coastal part plus lakes and
biggest cities) and temporal seasonality (peak summer season lasts approximately 2
months). In the province there are over 100 thousand places in collective accommodation
establishments, which constitutes nearly 1/5 of the total number for Poland.
Still, only less than a half is open all the year round. West Pomerania is administratively
divided into 21 counties, which are further divided into 114 communes.
Not surprisingly visitor centres in the surveyed communes were financed
mainly from public funds, i.e. from a communes’ budget. Figure 2 shows the percentage
of communes’ contribution to TICs budget.
20
15
18
10
5
2 1 1 1 2 1
0
100% 99% 90% 85% 80% 70% 0%
Figure 2. Number of Tourist Information Centres benefiting from a given share of public
sources budget (n=26)
Source: own elaboration.
In 77% of the communes surveyed visitor centres were entirely or almost entirely
(99%) financed from communes resources and an average percentage of public
funds in visitor centre’s budget was 92%. Just in one case a visitor centre was
financed by an independent branch organization. In one commune a respondent
refused to answer this question.
Both representatives of communes and tourism entrepreneurs were asked
whether they would like to participate in and finance a new potential Internet System
of Tourist Information (ISIT). A great majority declared their participation but
only a small percentage of both communes’ representatives and entrepreneurs declared
any financial support to such an initiative (figure 3).