ABSTRACT

Second home tourism is a traditional leisure activity among the Nordic people, which has recently gained a lot of popularity in Poland as well. In general, tourism strengthens a community’s economic base through more retail outlet service providers, a diverse range of offered products and also through income rise and employment creation. On the other hand, as previous research has shown, those discernible effects/advantages are often disregarded or even unobservable by the local community members. Given these circumstances, this research aims to examine whether and how local people’s opinions on the influence of second home tourism on the community’s economy differ from or concur with evidence-based impacts proved by the same study. The data on local people’s earnings and opinions were gathered from an interview survey carried out in 2009 in Poland and from a postal survey done in 2013 in Finland. A forward stepwise regression analysis was applied in order to create an explanatory model of local people’s perception of the positive effects of second home tourism on the community’s economy