Culinary tourism in Romania - professional points of view

The purpose – Romania has many resources for tourism development. The main focus of this paper is to provoke a debate about the opportunity of the culinary tourism development in Romania. Also, we intent to do an analysis regarding the premises for culinary tourism as niche in Romanian tourism. Design – During the past twenty years, Romania has issued various strategies/policies of development at national, regional, or local levels, but these, more or less, approached the development of the tourism sector as a whole. We open this paper from the question if in Romania, at the present moment, culinary tourism has the role that it really can have it, and if not, what solutions can we find to solve this? Method – The paper is the result of an empirical research, an exploratory study that includes literature review, meaning of seeking the good practices reported, and finally a SWOT analysis. Approach – Our paper attempts to outline the elements, which coordinate the Romanian tourism industry linked to this specific direction and also for future studies we intend to identify possibilities of development, namely culinary tourism based on application of some strong arguments consistent with local, regional and national characteristics. We chose this topic because we want to raise awareness of the stakeholders involved concerning developing this area, which we think can be transformed into a strategic direction of development. Findings – In Romania natural tourism resources are those which, over the years have been preserved in one form or another, untouched by human activities. These resources can be sold directly in tourism activity as "raw material" to create various tourism products. All this can be exploited, but we cannot compete with other countries that are more popular among tourists for the same kind of tourism. Judging all these we think it is normal to move towards a kind of tourism that we can differentiate and attract the interest of those who want to travel and have new experience, unique and authentic. We strongly believe that in Romania this possible direction can be culinary tourism. The originality of this paper – in our knowledge, at the present moment to deal a niche tourism, as culinary tourism could be in Romania, is a still a neglected objective, however this approach and this suggestion are novelty, as we demonstrated.