The analysis of customer behaviour in accommodation services after 1989 in the Czech Republic

Hospitality services rank among significant realisation factors of tourism. Due to its increasing importance and high potential, tourism falls into significant elements effecting a possible development of rural areas, especially in the area of maintaining and supporting small and medium businesses. This paper deals with the issues of customer behaviour in the Czech Republic with the emphasis on hospitality services. The main purpose was to identify and analyse development changes in customer behaviour in the area of these services. The pursuit of revealing the causes of such established changes and finding possible links and connections between the individual factors was an inseparable part of it. Furthermore, we compare the materially-technical base and the existing accommodation services in the period after 1989 with the contemporary situation and we also outline new trends in customer behaviour in the Czech Republic. To reach these set targets, a secondary date analysis was conducted and after that, a primary research in the form of questionnaire survey among consumers was carried out. During the statistical evaluation of the research, the frequency of the occurrence of each question was evaluated (e.g. Information on accommodation facilities is usually found on the Internet for 64% of respondents.), then dependences among verbal features were measured and the expressed hypotheses were tested (e.g. The assumption: less than 30% people are looking for accommodation in the category from 201 CZK to 300 CZK was not rejected and so we can say that approximately 30% people find their accommodation in the category 201-300 CZK). Important results of the conducted surveys with the relevant discussions are a part of this paper.