Abstract:

The demographic and social situation has changed a lot over the last four and five decades. Thus, post-World War II generations used to have fewer children than previous generations, and nowadays they reach the age of 65 or more. For these reasons, as a consequence of the progress of society and of medicine, these generations have a higher average life expectancy. In this light, increasing the quality of life has led to a greater openness to tourism. We can witness currently an unprecedented demographic phenomenon – the aging of the global population – whose first forms of manifestation were in the developed European countries, followed by North America, and also in Japan and Australia.

In this context, after the Second World War, in the United States and in Western Europe many social programmes for seniors were developed in order to provide the opportunity for social categories with modest incomes to travel, but also constituting a kind of recognition of their contribution to history and to the restoration of the country’s economy.

In contrast, Romania did not benefit from a policy directed to seniors. Only after the change of the political and legal system in 1990 attempts to develop tourism for this population segment have emerged. But their results are modest also because the current economic context is characterized by a much lower level of income than the European average in this respect.