Abstract:

The present study addresses issues on tourism in the European Union. The aim of this paper was to focus on some statistical indicators published by the Eurostat database and by the National Institute of Statistics of Romania. The indicators for which it was made an analyze of the dynamic data sets and considered for this work were: number of trips, nights spent in the Romanian accommodation establishments and tourist expenditures. For the quarterly time series “total nights spent by residents and non-residents” in “Hotels; Holiday and other short-stay accommodation; camping grounds, recreational vehicle parks and trailer parks”, we have focused on the analysis of the seasonality and a two years forecasting quarterly time series. The database covered the period between 2002 and 2013; data from some countries were not available or were partly available. The results have suggested that, across Europe, the number of trips by personal purpose is inversely proportional to the length of stay, and for professional purpose, the number of overnight stays +4 nights are approximately equal. In terms of nights spent in the accommodation establishments from Romania, by tourists from United States were the most numerous. Regarding seasonality analysis of the number of resident tourists staying in “hotels, holiday and other short - stay accommodation", there were achieved positive averages of gross seasonal deviations for Germany, Italy, Romania and United Kingdom, and negative averages for Bulgaria and Austria. For non-residents, the analysis of seasonality in the same conditions as those indicated above, we have obtained positive results for all countries analyzed, except for Romania and the United Kingdom.