POSSIBILITIES OF CREATING CROSS-BORDER TOURIST DESTINATIONS IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE.

Tourism development is one of today's popular tools for mitigating regional inequalities, thus many regions see tourism as an opportunity to break out. This is no different in the case of border regions, where development in this direction is also supported by cross-border, EU-financed or (co-)financed programs. The aim of the paper is to investigate whether there is a real possibility of connecting the areas along the national borders for tourism purposes and creating sustainable tourism in these regions. The study examines the possibility of creating cross-border tourist destinations in three pre-selected areas in the Hungarian-Croatian, Hungarian-Slovenian and North-Western Hungarian-Slovakian border regions during the last two, already closed programming periods. Results of the research show, that cooperation between border countries for real tourism purposes is still possible today, and it only really aimed at creating uniform reception areas that ignore borders in a few cases. After the implementation of the programs, cross-border destinations as sellable tourist products were not created. The study shows that, in the case of two regions, the potential is given and the initiatives aimed at creating cross-border destinations are promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]