Holiday Villages in Romania. Typology and Premises for Development

As tourism complex facility the holiday village is both an old and new concept in Romania. It is usually located in a specific area, with controlled access, designed to provide tourists a wide range of services such as: accommodation, catering, additional travel facilities for recreation, sports, and cultural activities. The present study focuses on the legal framework and regulations on the implementation and functioning of holiday villages, by analyzing their stage of development and causes of the increasing number of newly established holiday villages. However, the multitude of holiday villages, not necessarily complying with the requirements of the concept, brings out definite inconsistencies with the concept of holiday village. This was possible due to lack of legal and concept clarification of holiday villages and also due to the spatial dispersion of this tourism development phenomenon. Other states have managed to raise tourism to the rank of basic economic activity by narrowing the range of tourist activities and promotion of advanced specialization of some activities. Yet, it is not the case of tourism in Romania. Without this type of approach, tourism activities are largely losing their particularities, along with the concept of holiday village, whose true meaning is limited to just a few examples. Based on an exhaustive analysis we tried to establish a typology of holiday villages as well as to propose a zoning of the Romanian territory, in accordance with its suitability for the optimal functioning of these types of holiday village. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]