Cristi FRENȚ, Researcher, PhD (email: cristi.frent@incdt.ro)
National Institute of Research Development in Tourism, Bucharest, Romania
Alina NICULESCU, Researcher (email: niculescu@incdt.ro)
National Institute of Research Development in Tourism, Bucharest, Romania
ABSTRACT
When looking at the figures related to the number of foreign tourists in Romania there is huge difference between the number of foreign citizens arriving in Romania and registered at the border, on the one hand, and the number of non-residents (tourists) arriving in accommodation establishments on the other hand. The former relates to the border registering as an administrative data source (provided by the Border Police) while the latter to the survey on the occupancy of accommodation establishments carried out by the National Institute of Statistics. According to the latest figures, the ratio of this difference is more than 4 to 1.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of this difference and give some explanations on what is behind each of those statistics. In this regard, data series for the period 1991-2018 has been analysed individually for each of the 51 countries of citizenship for which data is available from both data sources. The Pearson correlation index will be used to highlight the correlation together with an average ratio of the values of indicators. Also, data coming from other sources are investigated such as mirror statistics from EU and non-EU countries but also other administrative data provided by different agencies.
It was revealed that although it is well known that traffic from neighbouring countries is largely responsible for this difference, this is not the main reason on why the figures are so different. Other reasons such as partial coverage given by accommodation establishments, transit traffic, different “non-tourism” travellers and local border traffic should also be envisaged. New data sources such as card transaction data of foreign travellers or mobile position data should also be considered in any future endeavours in this field.
Keywords: number of foreign tourists, accommodation statistics, border traffic, Romania
JEL classification: Z30, L83
