摘要：Features of SMHEs conducive establishing a number of business relationships among hotel enterprises and other business entities appearing in the process of providing services. Those relations have become a requirement for achieving business success of SMHEs. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of horizontal and vertical networks in order to increase the competitiveness of SMHEs. Based on the primary research conducted on 250 small and medium hospitality enterprises in the Republic of Croatia in 2012, the goal was to determine the implementation level of vertical and horizontal linking of those enterprises in order to increase competitiveness. Driven by the two hypotheses it was concluded that the vertical linking factor increases the competitiveness of small and medium hospitality enterprises while horizontal links of the above enterprises do not increase their market power and advantage.
关键词：vertical linking; horizontal linking; small and medium enterprises; competitiveness
