In today's modern economic conditions where competition plays a big role, it is the customers and their retention that are the key to the successful operation of any company. Clients are placed at the center, and attention is focused on meeting their needs. However, it turned out that just meeting the needs is not enough, customers often need to be thrilled to become loyal to the company. To achieve that, the quality of the product or service that the company sells to customers is extremely important. Given the growing role of the service sector in the economy, and thus tourism as its component, there is a growing need for an increasing quality of services themselves. Namely, there is ample evidence of the mutual positive impact of quality on customer satisfaction, and consequently on their loyalty. In the context of services, including tourism, this process is even more complex given that the client assesses the quality of service throughout the service delivery process. However, regardless of the importance of these concepts, in the context of rural tourism there are still many doubts, especially in the Republic of Croatia. There are many challenges for entrepreneurs engaged in this form of tourism, including the lack of adequate legislation, insufficient education of people involved in rural tourism, especially in the context of knowledge related to marketing activities and failure to recognize the importance of this segment at national, regional and local levels. The results of the research conducted for the purpose of preparing this paper have largely shown the coincidence with previously conducted research on this issue, and indicate precisely the aforementioned problems / challenges. Therefore, in order to solve these problems and encourage entrepreneurial activity in the context of rural tourism, it is important to thoroughly build a strategy from the beginning, from a legislative framework that would solve many doubts, through encouraging marketing activities and promotion of this form of tourism, to adequate education of all people involved in providing tourist services in rural areas. In this way, a quality strategy would be comprehensively created that would lead to the improvement of the service, creation and increase of satisfaction with more and more demanding and informed clients, and thus increase of their loyalty.