Slovak landscape becomes visible in terms of tourism with the mark of a butterfly with spread wings. With the small wings the authors would like to express the size of the country and those big, huge potential, which is located in this area. The general professional public as well as development of economic indicators suggests that this potential is untapped. The paper is aimed to identify barriers of the development of small and medium-sized tourism enterprises providing services in rural areas, which may use this potential significantly. Then to define criteria and identify rural accommodation facilities, because of these reasons, there was limited ability to provide non-repayable foreign financial resources from the Structural Funds. A part of this work is to identify the problems with the size of these enterprises and to define the expected assistance from authorities at regional level, also in the field of fire protection.