The Digital State of Tatra County's Accommodation Sector, 2026

Billboards down, budgets online

On 28 May 2026, after eleven years of work, Zakopane's City Council passed a landscape resolution. The large-format billboards and advertising sheets that have screened the entrance to town and the panorama of the Tatras for years are to disappear. The resolution takes effect thirty days after publication in the voivodeship's official gazette, and businesses get twelve months to comply, under threat of fines.

Commenting on the decision, the mayor of Zakopane appealed to business owners directly: move your advertising budgets online, because the internet now offers bigger and more effective possibilities than a sheet by the roadside. Hard to disagree. The only question is whether there's anything online to feed that move. Because advertising leads a guest to one place: the property's website and its listing. If something there doesn't work, the budget is lost no matter the medium.

We decided to check this before those budgets move online for good. We measured the digital offering of the county's accommodation stock in concrete numbers: speed, mobile behaviour, the booking path, local SEO, the technical side. And finally we checked how many of these properties already pay for advertising, sending traffic to exactly that place.

What we measured, and how

The sample comes to 207 accommodation properties in Tatra County, from two sources: the state Central Register of Hotel Facilities (categorised properties — hotels, mountain lodges, campsites) and the official municipal registers (the remaining properties providing accommodation services: apartments, cabins, guesthouses). This isn't just the top end of the market but a cross-section of it, one in which apartments and guesthouses are the most numerous, with hotels just behind.

One caveat right away, because it keeps the report honest. For a property to be examined, it had to have a website address. Properties with no website of their own — operating only through a listing or an intermediary portal — didn't enter the sample at all, and among rooms-to-let and apartments there are plenty of those. That means the real picture is most likely worse. Catering and attractions also fall outside the scope; we intend to analyse them in a separate study. The full method, thresholds, and summary tables are in the technical annex.

The website that isn't there

Let's start with something that ought to be impossible, and isn't. Seven properties from the official registers, about 3%, have a registered domain but no working site. Some domains don't respond, one returns a server error, one sits on the hosting provider's default placeholder. The address appears in the register and points at nothing. And remember, this is a lower bound, because properties with no site at all never entered the study.

Everything below concerns the 200 properties that have a working website. The gap map gathers them in one place — from Core Web Vitals to the missing sitemap.

Slow

Here the picture is hard. Not one of the 200 working properties reaches a good speed score — the threshold Google counts as green. The median performance score is 55 out of 100, and more than a third of the sites sit below 50.

More important than the lab score is what guests actually feel. On field data — from real traffic — half the sites fail the full set of Core Web Vitals. The median time for the main content to load is 2.3 seconds, almost 40% of sites cross the 2.5-second threshold, and one in six takes more than four seconds. That's no longer "a bit slow". That's the kind of time in which some guests close the tab before they see anything.

No English

The region lives off tourism, much of it foreign. And nearly half the properties, 46%, have no English version. A guest from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Germany who lands on a site like that gets a wall of Polish text and leaves. It's one of the cheaper things to fix, and one of the costlier to leave undone.

A listing without hours

Almost every property has a Google profile, around 95%. Practically all of them have photos, a category, and reviews. What's missing for roughly half is one thing: opening hours. A guest finds the property on Maps, sees the photos and the ratings, but doesn't know whether or when they can call. A small thing that Google reads as a signal of completeness, and a person reads as a signal of whether anyone here is even minding their own presence.

On the website itself it's similar — a solid foundation with holes. Almost every site has a page title, but the description, which decides what shows up in search results, is missing for one property in five. Structured-data markup, which helps the search engine understand that this is an accommodation property, is absent from nearly half.

What works

If the report consisted only of shortcomings, it would be dishonest. On one layer, the properties do well. Two thirds, 67%, have their own booking system: the guest picks dates, sees the price, and books directly, with no commission for an intermediary. A phone number that can be tapped from a mobile is there for almost all of them.

But here too the broader cross-section reveals a divide. One property in four has no online booking at all and takes it only by phone, and fifteen properties depend solely on intermediary portals. The further you get from the large, categorised hotels, the more often booking ends on the handset. This is still a relative strength — most can take a booking directly. Which is exactly why it's a shame for a guest to bounce off a slow site before they ever get to that booking.

Mobile and technical hygiene

On mobile, half the sites work properly, but one in three has real friction — horizontal scrolling, buttons too small to hit, a broken layout — and around 15% are simply broken on a phone. With tourist traffic, which is mostly mobile, that's not just a matter of comfort but a sign of how much care goes into the business at all.

Under the hood it's middling. More than a quarter of the sites have at least one dead internal link leading nowhere, one in six has no sitemap to ease indexing. Security and the formal requirements — HTTPS, a privacy policy, cookie consent — are standard, and here the properties hold the line.

They pay to send traffic to all this

Here we get to the crux. We checked how many of the studied properties additionally use paid advertising: Google Ads, Meta, including boosted posts, which of course also cost money. The result: 74%. Three quarters of the properties pay to attract traffic (verified in the public ad libraries: Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center; this is a snapshot of active campaigns, with no insight into the amounts).

And here the two layers of the report meet. Because that paid traffic lands on exactly the websites and listings we had just measured. The same study shows that, of the properties that advertise:

How much do they lose on this? The honest answer is: we don't know to the złoty, because we don't know their budgets or their revenues, and anyone who says otherwise isn't telling the truth. What we do know is how the mechanism works, and that's known from hard research on other markets. These are external benchmarks, from other industries and countries — not a measurement of these properties. They show the order of magnitude of the problem, not the specific loss of these firms.

Deloitte and Google's study "Milliseconds Make Millions" found that improving mobile speed by just 0.1 of a second was associated with a roughly 10% rise in conversion in the travel sector. Portent's analysis shows that sites loading in under two seconds convert roughly 50% better than those loading in five. In this sample one site in six loads in more than four seconds, and half fail Core Web Vitals. Every złoty spent on advertising inherits that load time before the guest sees the offer.

It's similar with language. According to CSA Research's study "Can't Read, Won't Buy", about 40% of consumers simply won't buy from a site in a foreign language. A more recent RWS study from 2023 put it even more strongly: four in five consumers won't buy from a brand that doesn't serve them in their own language. With 46% of properties lacking an English version, and with advertising that by its nature also reaches foreigners, this is no nuance. It's half the potential guests turned away at the door, even though someone paid for their click.

In other words: a fair share of that 74% is pouring water into a leaky bucket.

• have at least one significant gap in their offering at the same time: 72%
• send paid traffic to a site that fails Core Web Vitals: 47%
• advertise without having an English version: 33%
• pay for traffic while taking bookings only by phone: 26%
• advertise with an incomplete listing (no hours): 40%

Conclusions

Zakopane is taking down its billboards and, rightly, sending business owners online. But the real gap doesn't run between outdoor advertising and digital. It runs between launching a campaign and having a strategy and a ready offering.

Because digital advertising is no magic wand. It's exactly as effective as the place it leads to. You can have a site that looks fine at first glance and yet loads too slowly, doesn't speak English, or won't let you book any other way than by phone during reception hours. The guest won't name it — they'll simply leave. And the owner will conclude that "advertising on the internet doesn't work", when the problem wasn't the advertising but what it pointed to.

Hence the most important thing this area lacks, and that no resolution will fix: not more campaigns, but the awareness that a website and a listing aren't a calling card in the decorative sense, but a sales tool. Before you start paying to acquire traffic, you have to get the basics right. A billboard can be taken down by a single resolution. Making sure a digital złoty isn't wasted can be done only with knowledge and the right strategy. Moving advertising into the digital world is not just clicking the "boost post" button.