rural tourism and its contribution to the development of countryside

The Czech Republic does not have any central registry of rural tourism facilities; there is no information about the availability and quality of services or about their economic results. The goal of this contribution is to describe the current state of rural tourism in the Czech Republic, and to find the bottlenecks, problems and potential risks. The lack of information about this sector was the motivation for a survey which produced a great deal of information about the situation in the rural tourism business in the Czech Republic. We apply one-dimensional and multiple-dimensional statistical analyses to data from the completed questionnaires. The multiple-dimensional analysis is based on dependency tests and calculations of the intensity of the dependency between variables in contingency tables.The description and findings arise from the quantification and analysis of the information from the questionnaire survey. We find that most firms in the sector are small (so called micro firms) and usually have no links to the agricultural production. The income from tourism frequently represents only a supplementary part of the businesses’ whole revenues and the profitability is to a certain extent dependent on the services offered and how they are promoted. In general, the subjects providing special offers such as horse riding, local foods, firm tourism, etc., are more successful.