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The visitor, as the bearer of the demand for tourism services, is primarily a person with his natural desires. For many, a family business is a guarantee of a more helpful approach to meeting clients’ expectations. The paper aims to analyze the dependence between selected parameters of customer satisfaction in two groups of tourist trade establishment or tourism companies. The first group consists of family businesses, which have long shown a higher level of satisfaction compared to traditional tourism companies. The second group is classic tourism companies. In both cases, the research interest is the impact of a change in the assessment of staff and a change in the evaluation of the price/quality ratio on the change in the overall evaluation of these two groups of companies. Authors assumed that satisfaction with the staff in family businesses has a more significant impact on overall satisfaction. The research sample consists of 44 non-family and 18 family businesses. The research includes: assessment of the staff, evaluation of the price/quality ratio and overall evaluation for 2018 and 2020 based on secondary data, calculation of changes (indices) of the parameters as the ratio of values in 2020 to 2018, partial correlation analyzes for individual years and compilation of final correlation matrix, in which is examined the correlation between the change in the overall assessment in family and non-family businesses and the correlation between the change in the price/quality ratio in family and non-family businesses. The basic methods include analysis, synthesis, induction, analogy, comparison, empiricism and Pearson’s correlation coefficient from mathematical-statistical methods. The basic heuristic approach consists of professional literature on the subject matter and secondary sources obtained from the most important accommodation portal booking.com. In the synthesis of knowledge, there are used empirical experience resulting from doing long-term business in the field of tourism of authors. As part of the compilation of the resulting correlation matrix, authors state that in non-family businesses both correlation coefficients are higher than in family ones. In contrast, in evaluating the relationship between the change of personnel, the value of Pearson’s correlation coefficient is higher than 0.7, so it is a strong dependence. Non-family businesses should pay more attention to the human factor. The barrier to fulfillment can be impersonal leadership and inflexible organizational structures. In family businesses, on the other hand, the selection of employees is based on mutual trust. The benefit of the paper is the distinction between family and non-family businesses from the customer’s point of view, which is often a marginalized topic in theory and practice Keywords: competitiveness, correlation, customers´ satisfaction, family business, non-family business, tourism.

Creative regions contribute to a higher standard of living, are attractive to start-ups, create new jobs, reduce brain drain and attract applicants for university education. The paper aims to compare selected indicators of implementation of start-ups and creative potential in the regions of Slovakia at NUTS 3 level and to quantify their mutual relationship. Benchmarking of 8 Slovak NUTS 3 level regions is based on 2 comparisons, namely: 6 indicators of start-ups implementation (frequency of start-ups, creation of radical innovations, employment in fast-growing companies, venture capital awareness, crowdfunding awareness and possibilities of counselling in the implementation of start-ups) and 6 indicators of creative potential (openness and diversity, human capital, cultural environment, technologies, institutional environment and creative outputs). Numerical values of these indicators are obtained from secondary research studies – e. g. modified Slovak Creative Index, Regional Innovation Scoreboard, Slovak Start-up Report and websites of innovation incubators and crowdfunding platforms. To obtain the true values of these criteria, the analysis of secondary data – desk research and the method of pairwise comparison with 91 respondents (students of Slovak universities of economic orientation with Slovak or Ukrainian nationality) was used to determine the real significance (weights) of the criteria. According to pairwise comparison, the most important indicator of start-up implementation is possibilities of counselling and the most important indicator of creative potential is creative outputs. Consequently, the relationship between the two comparisons is quantified. The global benchmark based on the implementation of start-ups is the Bratislava region, as well as in the case with creative potential. There is a strong correlation (85.5 %) between the scores of the compared regions. The final ranking of the 5 regions out of 8 in both comparisons is also the same. The theoretical contribution is extending of the issue of benchmarking from traditional understanding (products, services, processes) to spatial understanding (region). The main practical contribution of the paper is to identify the weaknesses of each of the compared regions through benchmarking. Its implementation can be the basis for the development of regional strategies and the introduction of new study programs at universities. Keywords: benchmarking, creative potential, region, Slovak Republic, Start-UP.