Summary:

The paper aims at an identification, analysis and assessment of selected tourist development elements in rural areas in Poland according to individual regions. Due to their tourist amenities, for numerous tourists rural areas are a de-sirable place of leisure. Some people prefer hotels, motels or pension houses for accommodation, whereas the others use agrotourist farms. In pursuance of the act on tourist services, hotel facilities are objects which meet the requirements con-cerning their size and equipment, qualifications of the personnel and the scope of services provided as stated for the kind and category to which the object was clas-sified, these facilities must also meet the sanitary, fire and other requirements determined by separate regulations. Localization of sleeping facilities throughout rural areas in Poland is di-versified. In order to ensure the comparability of the obtained results, the absolute data concerning the number of sleeping facilities were presented as an indicator expressing the number of objects per the area of 1 km2. The most important sleeping facilities are hotels. The largest numbers of these are situated in the malopolskie and śląskie provinces, whereas the least number of hotels were registered in the lubelskie and podlaskie provinces. Simi-larly, the most numerous motels are encountered in the malopolskie and wielko-polskie provinces, and the least numerous in the podlaskie province. The podkar-packie province does not have a single object of this type. An analysis of the number of pension houses and youth hostels shows their largest numbers in the malopolskie province whereas the smallest in the kujawsko-pomorskie, łódzkie and mazowieckie provinces. The other analyzed objects were recreational centres. The most numerous are in the zachodniopomorskie province and the least numerous in the podlaskie and mazowieckie provinces. The research considered also so called other hotel facilities, i.e. agritourist farms. Relatively the largest number of these were noted in the śląskie province and the least number of agritourist farms in relation to the province area was reg-istered in the opolskie province. For the sake of the analysis, chain indices were determined for the number of investigated objects per 1000 km2 in the years 2000–2007. An increase in the number of hotels was registered in all analysed years. A similar growth tendency was noted also for agritourist facilities, except the year 2002, when a 18% decline in the number of these objects was registered in comparison with the previous pe-riod. Analysis of motels, pension houses, youth hostels and camping sites revealed only small tendencies for both growth and decrease in the number of the objects of this type in the individual years. On the other hand considering recreational cen-tres, a decrease in this type of facilities was noted in each of the analysed periods. The conducted analysis allowed to indicate the rural areas in Poland char-acterized by a big number of hotel facilities. Their greatest condensation is ob-served in the malopolskie province, therefore it may be deducted that tourist traffic in this area is particularly intensive. The research conducted for the years 2000–2007 revealed a growth ten-dency characterising the number of agritourist facilities and hotels located in ru-ral areas, whereas a declining tendency was registered for recreational centres located there.