Tourism development is one of today's popular tools for mitigating regional inequalities,
thus many regions see tourism as an opportunity to break out. This is no different
in the case of border regions, where development in this direction is also supported
by cross-border, EU-financed or (co-)financed programs. The aim of the paper is to
investigate whether there is a real possibility of connecting the areas along the
national borders for tourism purposes and creating sustainable tourism in these regions.
The study examines the possibility of creating cross-border tourist destinations in
three pre-selected areas in the Hungarian-Croatian, Hungarian-Slovenian and North-Western
Hungarian-Slovakian border regions during the last two, already closed programming
periods. Results of the research show, that cooperation between border countries for
real tourism purposes is still possible today, and it only really aimed at creating
uniform reception areas that ignore borders in a few cases. After the implementation
of the programs, cross-border destinations as sellable tourist products were not created.
The study shows that, in the case of two regions, the potential is given and the initiatives
aimed at creating cross-border destinations are promising.