More foreign tourists to Romania: where do they come from and where in the country do they go?

More foreign tourist came to Romania in the first half of this year than in the first six months of 2013, but only a quarter of them were registered in hotels and other accommodation units. Germans, Italians and French make the largest groups of foreign tourists to Romania, statistics show. The country welcomed 1.7 percent more foreign tourists in June this year than in June 2013, some 836,000, according to the Statistics Office, based on data from customs. Only about a quarter checked in at local hotels. For the whole first half of the year, 3.4 million foreign tourists entered Romania, up 3.4 percent year-on-year, and again only a quarter - 840,000 of them - were registered at local accommodation units. Out of the total 808,000 tourists who checked in at Romanian accommodation units in June, only a quarter - 205,000 - were foreigners. Over half of them were from the EU – 133,000, while only 16,100 were from North America. Almost 26,000 tourists came from Asia, and only 1,900, from Africa. Foreigners stayed on average for two nights at Romanian accommodation units. The average stay was higher for Romanians – 2.7 days. Three quarters of the foreigners who came to Romania in June choose to stay in Bucharest and other large cities, while only 11.5 percent of them chose other touristic locations, 8.5 percent went to mountain resorts, 2 percent to spas, 2.9 percent to the seaside and to Constanta, and only 1 percent to the Danube Delta, according to statistics. In the first quarter of the year, 840,000 foreign tourists checked in at Romanian hotels and boarding houses, with a bit over half of million of them coming from the EU. Only some 60,000 were from North America, some 94,000 from Asia, 7,000 from South America, and 8,700 from Africa. Germans were the most numerous group of foreign tourists in the first half of 2014, some 101,000, followed by Italians, 83,600, and by French – 56,000. There were 55,000 Israeli tourists and 51,200 American tourists in Romania in the first six months of this year. The smallest number of foreign tourists as reported for statistics came from Norway – 6,300. The data is based on numbers reported by local accommodation units of at least 10 beds - 4,000 such units across Romania. The full statistics from Romanian’s National Statistics Office INS is here, in pdf, in English. editor@romania-insider.com