摘要：European professional associations such as HOTREC (Hotels, Restaurants & Cafés in Europe) are engaged in establishing quality standards for hospitality facilities and in assessment of their applicability in European countries. Tourism is one of the leading industries in Europe and in the rest of the world. Its future development is conditioned by adequate market profiling and positioning of the national tourist product. However,the premise of the international competitiveness of the national tourist product is to establish the required quality standards of its material basis,namely hotel product. Categorization is the process of ranking hotels according to quality. Category is verified rank of quality and it guarantees the fulfillment of certain standards. In European countries we can observe significant differences in categorization criteria and standards of the hotel. This leads to a mismatch of national hotel products quality,which reflects negatively on the relationship between expected and perceived quality of the customer. Inconsistency the quality of basic,hospitality components of tourist product limits the possibility of manifestation his authentic,attractive components. Therefore,the creation of European hotel categorization standards by the HOTREC is an important step towards harmonization of the quality of national hotel products. It is also a step towards creating an integrated European hotel product,with globally applicable quality standards.
