Hungary’s potential in sports tourism

The strengths of Hungary in sports tourism include those places, which are suitable for trekking, running, cycling, horseback riding, lakes and rivers which offer excellent opportunities for water sports and the country’s national parks, protected areas, thermal waters and medicinal waters, which are linked to ecotourism and health tourism. In domestic tourism, similar to the trends in developed countries, there is a growing demand for healthy environment and active recreation, which make it possible to combine rural tourism and sports tourism. The new, trendy forms of activity have lately attracted new target groups. (e.g. surfing, snowboarding, mountain-biking). There are new kinds of activities in the market of sports tourism, including nordic walking, geocaching, wakeboarding, visiting adventure parks, playing paintball and doing extreme sports. Fashionable extreme sports are often built into the programmes of business travels and team building programmes. (E.g. extreme sports, dragon boating).

People can participate in an increasing number of mass sports events, which offer a challenge for paerticpants. (Cross-lake swimming, street running events, triathlon). There is an increasing number of passive sports tourists, too, people who travel and watch significant international sports events. (Formula-1, Olympic Games, Continental and world championships.) Unfortunately, there are weaknesses in Hungary’s sports tourism, too. These weaknesses include the lack of proper institutional background, the deficit of service providers’ marketing and foreign language skills, the relatively low level of marketing and communication activities, and finally, poor infrastructure. These weaknesses might lead to the emmigration of specialists, the misuse of existing facilites and the decline in improvements.

A welcome change is that due to the New Széchenyi Plan, a tourism development of several billion forints will be realized within the framework of the Regional Development Operational Programmes, the Healing Hungary – Hungarian Health–Industry sub-programme.     

For further details see

http://profitline.hu/hircentrum/hir/220092/Milliardok-sportturisztikai-fejlesztesre