Conditions for Creating Business Tourism Offers and the Regional Potential in Poland

This paper reports on an empirical analysis of the readiness of Polish regions to develop business tourism products. The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the potential of hotel facilities to support business tourism in Poland. The objective of this study was to identify and analysis of the potential of business tourism in Poland, and what internal and external conditions are important for business tourism development. The authors researched these issues by analyzing the statistical data of the Polish Central Statistical Office. Based on the collected data, the components of the business tourism potential were specified. Two analytical methods—Hellwig’s and TOPSIS—were implemented, and then, the strength of interdependence of both rankings was analyzed by using the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The results of the analysis indicate that particular conditions for shaping business tourism products existing in the country. However, the diversity of business tourism potential in Poland is clearly visible. The highest value of synthetic measures of the potential attractiveness of business tourism was characteristic for those regions which have a wide range of tourist attractions. In order to verify how the regions used their potential to attract business tourists, a comparison of the obtained results and coefficients related to density of tourist movement and Schneider’s intensity of tourist movement was made. The analysis of both indicators showed that some of the Polish regions used their possibilities in an appropriate way.