SUSTAINABILITY AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN RURAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT

Day by day sustainability is becoming more and more important, but as the current trends show, the role of sustainability has especially grown in rural tourism, where there are good opportunities to implement smart and energy-efficient technologies. The main purpose of the paper is to analyze what are the challenges of rural tourism, what are the trends now and what is the role of sustainability, which guarantees new opportunities and gives a competitive advantage to the regions. According to qualitative and quantitative research methods, the article highlights and studies the importance of sustainability in the context of rural tourism. The main idea of the article is to study what sustainable rural tourism means and why is it important, and it also studies the sustainable rural tourism concept itself and sustainable rural tourism experiences in Georgia and other foreign countries. To summarize, it can be said that sustainable rural tourism is one of the important trends of modern tourism and it can have a positive impact on regional development, too.