The flaws in infrastructure and agriculture are the main obstacles in the way of Romanian tourism's evolution. Sorin Ionescu, a managing partner of the Fivestar Hospitality Consulting and Management, said it during yesterday's Hospitality Forum. He argued: "We must make a choice between mass tourism and small scale tourism. But because infrastructure and agriculture, Romania is standing no chance to approach mass tourism in the next 5-6 days and we shall have to focus on the latter type." He added the cost of food in Romania was another disadvantage in competition. The business world should get more information about the plans for investments in infrastructure coming from various ministries. Sorin Ionescu commented: "Try to include in your programs some promotion for investment projects. There must be found modern means to promote such values. Russia, for instance, promotes investments in infrastructure. This would be one means to attract attention on Romania." Useful statistics According to Sorin Ionescu, a desirable element would be hotel owners' willingness to get useful statistics: "As we know, we have got a big problem with statistic data. As hotel owners, we must take efforts to get statics for a clever use. Our industry, for instance, is in tight connection to the real estate. Good statistics can help us see, for example, if there is an excedent of hotel rooms on the market or if there is need of more and an investor can think about it. " (...) He commented that the statiscs system used by the National Institute of Statistics in Romania was useless. Romania is now part of a program concerning the collecting of statistic data about tourism that uses several criteria. The program is authored by the World Tourism Organization and it is developing via Austria's National Statistics Institute, as this country is thought to have the best statistics data collecting system. According to authorities, this may not be implemented earlier than 2 years.

Corina SCARLAT