TOURISM ECONOMY. MOUNTAIN TOURISM: QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF WINTER DESTINATIONS IN ROMANIA

Abstract

The continuous development of mountain tourism derives from the multiple positive points that the
mountain has in satisfying the particularly diverse tourist needs. The strong point is represented by
the extremely valuable and complex tourist potential, as well as the variety of natural and anthropic
resources. The complementarity of these resources makes the arrangement and development of
winter resorts with a useful and attractive profile called ski areas to be more and more common
in mountainous areas. The purpose of this paper is to analyze winter destinations in order to
conclude whether Romania can create a competitive advantage based on this type of tourism, both
at European and global level. We used statistical data for all Romanian resort for sky destination,
respectively the total number of practicable kilometers, total number of cableway installations and
the accommodation capacity. For the quantitative analysis we used the SPSS 23.0 statistical software
and applied the following statistical methods: Person correlations, chi square test and Student’s t
test for paired samples. The research results, obtained with statistical methodology, support and
highlight the significant differences between the Romanian mountain resorts for winter activities.