This research compares tourism competitiveness of two neighboring countries, Romania and Bulgaria, which have many similarities economically as well as from a geopolitical and historical perspective. Despite these similarities, immediately after the 1990s, which marked the fall of the communist regime, the tourism phenomenon in the two countries had divergent evolutions. As the tourism industry in Bulgaria, especially its seaside tourism, underwent unprecedented development, the tourism activity in Romania systematically lost its competitiveness. The factors affecting the appearance and increase of such a difference are of interest to the Romanian seaside tourism. To generate the answer to this problem, we perform a series of comparative analyses with data from the World Economic Forum, in terms of the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report (2011-2015), `the National Authority for Tourism of Romania, and the National Institute of Statistics from Romania and Bulgaria. We identified a series of constitutive elements relating to the success of the Bulgarian seaside tourism and a sequence of deficiencies in the strategic and organizational maneuvers of the tourism activity at the Romanian seaside.
ROMANIA VERSUS BULGARIA: A SHORT ANALYSIS OF THE COMPETITIVENESS OF SEASIDE TOURISM