ROMANIA AS A DESTINATION FOR CULTURAL AND HERITAGE TOURISM

Abstract

Romania possesses a consistent heritage including cultural, historical and folkloric resources with a high potential for tourism valorization. Despite of this valuable heritage, the development of cultural tourism is still limited and more actions are needed to be undertaken for a better promotion and attraction of tourist flows in the most important cultural areas. Due to this potential and to recent massive operations of restoration and renovation of historical buildings, but also due to the improvement of services and education, Romania has succeeded to improve its supply for heritage tourism. In this paper we analyze the main issues related to the competitiveness of Romania as a cultural destination, we assess its place among other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, but also which were the recent developments on this topic. A detailed investigation has been performed regarding the main attractions and destinations for heritage tourism in Romania, including the cultural and intangible cultural heritage sites from Romania included on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Our conclusions go to the actions necessary for improving Romania’ s place on the market of cultural and heritage tourism, such as: improvements in the infrastructure for increasing the accessibility of the most important destinations, a more focused vision and enhanced strategy for the development and management of tourist attractions, more efficient actions for internal and international promotion, the adoption of appropriate management and marketing tools to make these objectives known, especially to international tourists etc.