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BULGARIA AS A SOLO TRAVELER DESTINATION: ASSESSMENT OF AVAILABLE RESOURCES
Abstract
Nowadays solo traveling is an emerging market in tourism industry. It is relatively new type of tourism which forms express the communities’ will to have entire disposal of their choice and freedom. The purpose of the current study is to assess the available resources for developing solo tourism in Bulgaria. The used methodology consists in application of Hartmut Bossel’s system-based approach where the destination is divided into three large subsystems - human, support and natural. Based on the results from a conducted survey, the authors formulated the hypothesis that a focus should be put on the natural system which includes physical environment (resources) and intangible environment (local mentality and cultural habits). The study also proposed a conceptual framework adapted to the system-based model formulating factors and criteria by which the resources assessment was made. Through a specialized literature and tourism trends overview a typology of solo traveler was pointed out according to the travel purposes and motives. The results showed that the available resources are sufficient to meet the traveler needs, but differentiation of solo travel demand brings to the forefront the need of diversification of destination tourism product. Once succeeded this may contribute to minimizing one of the main challenges of Bulgarian tourism industry – seasonality. Due to the fact that solo traveling is a new-born phenomenon in destination Bulgaria and the lack of statistical information, the quantitative parameters measurement of this type of tourism is yet in its opening stage.
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References11
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