Consumer's behavioural patterns: the romanian tourists

• Autores: Ingrid Rosca
• Directores de la Tesis: Pilar Presas Maynegre (dir. tes.), Andrea Bikfalvi (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Girona ( España ) en 2017
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: María del Mar Alonso Almeida (presid.), Josep Llach i Pagès (secret.), Florina Magdalena Pinzaru (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Derecho, Economía y Empresa por la Universidad de Girona y la Universidad de Vic-Universidad Central de Catalunya
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
• Resumen

  • What does makes a consumer choose between different alternatives? What underlies behind the decision making process? What was not said about the behaviour of the tourists? This study will remarkably answer the above questions describe the way that the people from the old Dacia land takes decisions in the tourism framework.

    Problem statement. Imagine that you are a tourism entrepreneur. You prepared yourself and your business for future clients. You offer quality services. And so does your competitors. What makes you better for being choose by tourists? Imagine that you are an academic professional looking to define the tourist behaviour. You read a lot, and the more you read, the more your beliefs are blurred. Taken the less-is-more effect, the purpose of this research is to offer a deeper understanding of the behaviour of Romanian travellers and measure their potential as national and international tourists.

    Previous investigation. While most of the research focused on Romania as a touristic destination, relatively less attention was paid to the behaviour of Romanians as tourist travellers to other European countries. To some extent this is also due to the significant flow of Romanian ―tourists‖ that emigrated after 1989, the clear separation between the genuine travellers being rather difficult. Nevertheless, there is general agreement with respect to the fact that there is a change in preferences observed after 1989, when the influx of tourists coming from neighbouring former communist countries went down and at the same time many Romanians decided to spend their holidays abroad (see Mazilu, 2008). Moreover, statistics indicate that 2007 was one of the few years that registered a surplus in the balance of payments for the Romanian tourism. That is, foreigners were spending more in Romania than Romanians abroad 3 (Mazilu, 2008: 175). It is therefore necessary to analyse the behaviour of the Romanian travellers abroad and the main attributes taken into consideration when choosing their touristic destinations. Similar analyses have been pursued in some other former communist countries like, for example, China (see Beverly Sparks, Grace Wen Pan, 2009) and Bulgaria (Bachvarov, 1997).

    Key findings. I expect to discover the behaviour as being the main factor in deciding the framework of the offer. It cannot be elaborated or promoted a service unless it is discovered for whom is this service needed, its attractions and motivations for what is chose.

    Originality of the work. Several contributions are expected from this research: 1. Offer first hand empirical evidence on the behaviour of the Romanian as tourists given that, there isn‘t much evidence on this issue; 2. Offer a socioeconomic and behavioural profile of the Romanian tourists by identifying the main tourist patterns; 3. Determine marketing, cultural and economic policy implications to be taken into account not only by the tourism entrepreneurs and academicians. The results are expected to allow also the construction of a decision-making framework that could help foresee future developments in the touristic preferences of Romanians.

    4. Determine how the profile of the Romanian traveller fits into the four types of behaviours determined by the literature on behaviour and stimulus respond: usually responds behaviour, taking limited decision, taking extensive decision, impulsive buying behaviour. This result may have methodological and practical implications: it could be used for example in elaborating and defining 4 a country-level stimulus of consumer behaviour; the results may be used also in the academic environment by the teaching specialists on services marketing.

    5. The results will be presented and discussed in international conferences and published in academic journals.