Romania welcomed slightly more foreign tourists in the first ten months of 2013 compared to the same period of 2012.

However, foreigners still form only a small number of the tourists checking into specialized facilities such as spas and resorts.

There was, however, some patterns revealed by the data from the country's National Statistics Office. Foreign tourists incomings covered only around 20 percent of all incomings, and the rest was covered by Romanians, similarly to 2012.

Around 1.5 million foreigners came to Romania during this period, with Germans, Italian and French ranking high in the charts, with 200,000, 150,000 and some 100,000 tourists from each group, respectively.

Most of the foreign tourists targeted capital city Bucharest and county capital cities, some 1.1 million during the first ten months of 2013, while only 170,000 tourists went to secondary localities and tourist routes.

Some 120,000 went to Romanian mountain resorts, and some 30,000, to spa resorts. Around 30,000 foreigners went to riviera resorts, but excluding the county capital Constanta, and around 20,000 went to the Danube Delta, including the Tulcea county capital city.

Romania's mountain resorts were more popular among Israeli tourists, with some 15,000 tourists, slightly higher than the 14,000 German group. But Germans were the biggest group of foreigners visiting Romania's riviera – some 6,000 people, followed by Poles, some 3,000 visitors. Germans and Poles also came first when it came to visitors to the Danube Delta. Romanian spa resorts were more popular among neighbors: Hungarians, with a group of 8,600 visitors, and Moldavians, from the Republic of Moldova, some 6,900 visitors.

In October 2013, the arrivals of foreign visitors to Romania, according to customs data, amounted to 610,400, 3 percent less compared to October 2012. Most of the foreign visitors came from European countries (92.8 percent), and over a half - 63.8 percent of the total arrivals of the foreign visitors to Romania were from EU countries. Out of these, the highest number of arrivals were from Hungary (32.1 percent), Bulgaria (25.1 percent), Germany (10.6 percent), Italy (7.4 percent), Poland (4.6 percent) and Austria (3.8 percent).

The average time stay for a foreign tourists in Romania, when checked in at a tourism facility, was of 2 days, slightly lower than the average overnight stay for Romanian tourists, of 2.6 days.

The full tourism stats for the first ten months of 2013 are here, in pdf, in English.

editor@romania-insider.com