The spring edition of Romania’s Tourism Fair was held
over February 18 and February 21. It was a special edition, held exclusively
online, enabling exhibitors to display their holiday offers for the most
attractive domestic destinations. Also, online visitors of the fair had the
opportunity to compare accommodation and transport fees straight on the
platform, which also included gadget offers and holiday accessories.
Delia Botan is Romexpo marketing manager. She gave
us details about the success of Romania’s Tourism Fair’s first online edition.
Delia Botan:
The Romanians have a tremendous urge to explore the
world, and that was obvious at the virtual version of Romania’s Tourism Fair.
Ten thousand people registered for this edition and made roughly 32,000 visits
on the platform, for the four days of the fair. The exhibitors’ offer was
extremely generous for the visitors of our platform. All in all, promoted as
part of this virtual edition were Romania’s most beautiful touristic areas, which
were represented, as usual, by county councils and municipalities. Practically,
we could say our visitors had their fair share of the most comprehensive
digital experience in the field of tourism, being a couple of clicks away from
purchasing their much-desired holiday, at once enjoying the leisure of their
own home.
The Descoperimromania.ro platform was one of the
exhibitors. The platform presented the most beautiful and the most attractive
destinations. With details on that, here is project manager Alina Rosoiu who
also disclosed virtual visitors’ areas of interest.
Alina Rosoiu:
Tourists are interested in Romania, in traditions, in
special accommodation units with a limited number of rooms. This year,
tourists’ interest in hotel compounds has been on the wane. Extremely sought-after
are the little guesthouses and agro guesthouses. We have a special interest in the
Danube Delta, in the Romanian Black Sea coast, in Maramures and, last but not
the least, in Bukovina. We have very good offers for tourists. For instance,
Easter Holiday packages start from 200 Euros, for a stay in the Danube Delta, and
from 150 Euros for a stay in the Danube Gorges. The pandemic, which is still
ongoing, may scare us, yet we need to know Romania is a safe destination. We do
our best for our guests’ safety. We’re waiting for you and we comply with all
the sanitary safety standards in place. We’re in the middle of nature, so there
is a minimum amount of risk. Accommodation units abide by the sanitary
protection requirements, so it should be no problem for you to visit Romania.
One of the most sought-after destinations at the fair
was Maramures, as expected. Maramures
County Council’s head of the Public Relations Department, Laura Danci, gave us
the details on that.
Laura Danci:
The stand of Maramures this year was not as lively as
it was in the previous years, sadly, because of the pandemic. We were present
only through an online platform, yet we did have a couple of offers and we also
came up with a new site, Visit Maramures. The offer we have come up with at the
Tourism Fair was labelled ‘Twelve reasons to visit Maramures’ while on our new
site, Visit Maramures, we have covered just about everything Maramures had to
offer to tourists, from gastronomy, traditional craftsmen to cultural tourist
routes, to landscape. In the previous years we also launched an application for
mobile devices, Visit Maramures, where we made available all tourism
information centers, all the guesthouses. Yet we thought that a website will be
a lot easier to access by everybody. We took part in the fair, and the feedback
we got was quite good. We had very many visitors, even online. Hundreds of visitors
asked us what they could visit in Maramures and what a surprise we had, in
three days alone, the site had 2,047 views.
Carmen Păun is Head of the Marketing and PR Office
of Oltenia’s Museum in Craiova, Ms Paun invites us to take a cultural trip to
southern Romania.
Carmen Paun:
It has been a privilege for us, as a cultural
institution, to receive an invitation from Romania’s Tourism Fair, the virtual
edition, 2021. Our products have met the demands of our public, whose interest
in digital consumption is growing: information, education, entertainment. Our
offer entirely focused on these three components. We started off from the idea
that the scope of a museum and its cultural products needs to go beyond the
physical confines. So we created cultural products meant to draw the public
especially through visual impact and then through the information we offer.
The Museum of Oltenia is an institution which is more
than 105 years old, it is a cultural landmark for the area of Oltenia, having a
regional importance.
Carmen Paun:
It manages an impressive heritage, of which 570 items
have been included in the treasure category. We do our job in four separate
buildings, right at the heart of Craiova, always awaiting our visitors with our
12 essential permanent exhibitions of three sections that we have. Also, we
have three interactive areas and two modern conference rooms. So what we got is
a huge potential Oltenia’s cultural sector in Craiova offers to the public. As
of late we have also promoted educational programs. We have digitalized the
content of our exhibitions extensively.
Thanks to the local administration, since 2016, Dolj
County has had a cultural-artistic route, labelled Dolj history and
traditions, with five major assets: the Bania House, the history and
archaeology section, and two semi-fortified buildings, cule, in
Romanian, located in the commune of Brabova. For the refurbishment of the two cule
alone, more than one million Euros has been invested .
We have also reached Transylvania and we spoke to
Sturza Ileana, with the Zlatna Tourism Promotion and Information Center.
Sturza Ileana:
Our virtual
tourism information and promotion stand covered the accommodation units in the
region, natural tourist assets, the anthropic ones, the region’s specific
traditions and the tourist routes. For lovers of nature, we have two, maybe
three-hour routes, but also routes lasting 13 to 14 hours or even a couple of
days. I should also like to mention the natural assets, the limestone blocks in
Valea Mica, the Fenes Gorges, the Bulbuci Rock. For those who are into climbing
and sports climbing, the Fenes Gorges and the Bulbuci Rock are the perfect
destination. We have received collaboration offers from travel agents, from
other tourism operators and I think we have made ourselves more visible that
before. I can infer that from the great number of viewers we had.
Access was free of charge to the virtual edition of
Romania’s Tourism Fair. The virtual stands could be accessed from anywhere,
while special offers were found very quickly, thanks to the intelligent
filtering system.