Rural development strategies through rural tourism activities in romania: chance for an internal demand?

Abstract

Rural tourism related activities have been widely regarded as key-tools for rural development, specially in those countries —as Romania and all East European countrieswhere rural space and production is still a major part of whole economic structure, trying by this way to revitalize declining areas and ensure them possibilities of achieving a sustainable future. At this purpose, rural tourism must be considered like a complex plurality of multi-faced activities, contributing both to growth of other activities in rural areas and to improvement of life quality for local inhabitants, all this as part of an effective rural development integrated system.

Due to necessary attraction of foreign currency in order to contribute in solving structural troubles of national economies in these countries, design of quite a lot of rural tourism activities on there has usually focused on international demand. However, and even when this could be perfectly right at a first stage, evidence for other countries shows that long-time maintenance of such activities requires of the existence of a —perhaps not so attractive, but indispensable— internal market.

In this paper, we give first descriptive evidence about existence and characteristics of this domestic —and mostly unexpected— market for rural tourism activities in Romania.