Abstract
There is a general consensus that tourism activity must have the support of a local community in order to build sustainable tourism development. Among the competitive Romanian tourism products, festival tourism should be mentioned, even though it is relatively new. Therefore, given the traditional communities from rural areas which are confronted with an international flux of tourists, it is vital to analyze the perception of and support for festivals. The presumption is that if there are benefits for the locals, support increases. In order to achieve the objective of the study, research has been conducted among the local rural community of Bontida, which is the location of an international annual music festival. The instrument used was a questionnaire which had four parts that aimed to measure the cultural benefits and costs of the festival and the sense of well-being of the community, given the fact that previous studies focused mainly on the economic and environmental impacts, but not so much on the socio-cultural dimensions. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that the benefits are greater than the perceived costs, a fact which is encouraging from the perspective of developing a sustainable tourism strategy, both by the local authorities and private stakeholders.
Highlights
Over the last decade, increased attention has been paid to evaluating the impact of tourism on the perceptions and attitudes of local communities because of the direct relation of these communities’ support for tourism development [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8], which could be a major factor in building a destination brand [9] and implicitly contributing to the development of local tourism [10,11,12]
Due to the fact that many communities have different cultures and traditions, the development of tourism has different effects on them, especially when it comes to international festival tourism, which brings together many nationalities from all over the world
The impact of such events is important for analysis within traditional communities such as the Romanian villages, given their ability to preserve traditional culture and ethno-cultural heritage [29,30]; it is important to revitalize old traditions and invent new reasons to celebrate, especially in rural areas [31]
Summary
Besides the fact that tourism has a significant influence on the economy, it determines and influences the socio-cultural life of local communities in terms of lifestyle, cultural values, exchanging ideas between individuals by direct interaction [24], level of education and civilization [25,26,27]. Another important issue which tourism enables within host communities refers to increased quality of life. Given the huge impact that the COVID-19 crisis has had on the travel and leisure industries—temporarily stopping the festival in 2020 and in 2021—it is important to analyze the community’s perception from the perspective of finding a means to recover, with aid from the government and from local stakeholders [37], as well as to create a future competitive destination brand
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