WAGE TRANSPARENCY, SKILL DEMAND AND LABOUR MARKET STRUCTURE IN TOURISM: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ONLINE JOB ADVERTISEMENTS IN HUNGARY, ROMANIA AND SLOVAKIA

The study aims to examine the structural characteristics of tourism labour demand in three Central and Eastern European countries through online job advertisements. The main objective is to identify how wage transparency, occupational composition, digital skill requirements, and spatial concentration differ across national tourism labour markets and which factors explain numerical wage disclosure in tourism job postings. The empirical analysis is based on 1,551 publicly available tourismrelated job advertisements collected through web scraping from the leading online job platforms of the three countries: Profession.hu (Hungary), eJobs.ro (Romania), and Profesia.sk (Slovakia). The study applies descriptive statistics, logistic regression, multinomial classification, text mining, and territorial concentration indicators (HHI, Gini coefficient) to examine wage disclosure, sectoral composition, skill demand, and spatial distribution. The results show significant cross-country differences in wage transparency: Slovak tourism job advertisements display substantially higher numerical wage disclosure, while Romanian postings show lower effective salary transparency under strict numerical criteria. Senior positions and English language requirements significantly reduce the likelihood of salary disclosure, whereas hotel, food and beverage, and multilocation advertisements increase it. Digital skills appear frequently in postings but do not generate a stable wage premium, suggesting that digitalization in tourism is primarily operational rather than strategic. The findings indicate that wage transparency in tourism labour markets is shaped not only by human capital requirements but also by organizational standardization, negotiation logic, and platform–institutional context. The study contributes to tourism labour market research by demonstrating that online job advertisements provide a robust comparative source for identifying labour market segmentation, digital transformation, and regional concentration patterns in tourism employment.