The summer holiday season in Romania can be extended only with the help of foreign tourists, especially seniors from Germany and Austria, who come year-round, unlike Romanians, who prefer July and August, says Dragoș Anastasiu, vice-president of the Alliance for Tourism (APT), an organization reuniting associations involved in tourism.

“Tourists ask ‘what experiences can I have in Romania?’. You can come up with all sorts of stories and package deals – staying two days in Bucharest, then four or five in the Danube Delta, in Transylvania or Bucovina. People come for this kind of mix,” said Anastasiu in an interview for PrimaTV, quoted by G4Media.

A representative of tour operators, hotel owners, workers in the industry, and even associations of tour guides, Anastasiu says that remote area tourism can be one of Romania’s biggest attractions. “Ecotourism, agrotourism, cultural tourism, this entire domain of slow [tourism]. We must take care not to ruin it because we have the tendency, including in the Danube Delta, to pour concrete all over,” he added.

Anastasiu also believes that limiting Romania’s vacation season to the summer months makes it too short, leading prices to skyrocket and making experienced personnel hard to come by.

“You can’t have people working for three months and pay them for a year. You can’t. So you have to constantly hire new ones. Personnel is the biggest problem,” he says. To give workers in tourism job security, higher wages, and more time to acquire experience, Anastasiu believes that Romania would need a longer vacation season.

That can only be done, he says, with foreign tourists from Germany, Austria or Switzerland, who are not deterred by cold or bad weather. “Romanians only go in July and August when the weather is nice outside and the kids are on vacation,” according to Anastasiu.

radu@romania-insider.com

(Photo source: Inquam Photos / Octav Ganea)