Agritourism, a constant challenge for the romanian tourism

Abstract

The constantly growing number of travel destinations and the enhanced quality of existing ones put great pressure on those responsible for a given destination to find better ways to compete in the tourism marketplace and to do so in a sustainable manner. Consequently, a necessary first step in achieving this goal would be to better understand those forces and success factors that determine the competitiveness of major tourism destinations. Success factors of a specific destination can then be enhanced if applied to a specific tourism product that could achieve sustainable growth over the longer term. The objective of this paper is to present an analysis on Romania’s competitiveness as a tourism destination, based on Porter’s diamond model. Throughout the analysis, we focus on the most competitive export products in the industry and their prospects for future growth. As the investigation reveals that opportunities exist for rural tourism in Romania, and due to the special relevance of agritourism in our country, where the transformation of rural space is accelerated by the process of integration into the European Union, we further channel the competitiveness assessment on this specific tourism product. We find that agritourism allows for a diversification of components of rural economies, which would otherwise be condemned to disappear, entailing high human and economic costs. It also allows to maintain, to protect and even to enhance our heritage and patrimony. We conclude that agritourism can make a valuable contribution to rural economies, and provide several potential benefits. A sustainable development of agritourism is likely to generate: job retention and creation, farm support, landscape conservation, support to rural arts and crafts, nature conservation, environmental improvements, and enhanced role of local communities.