We caught the fag end of a debate about occupancy rates in Romania’s hotels and pensions yesterday afternoon, a debate held on the – in our opinion – rapidly deteriorating Realitatea TV news channel. (Given that we consider the standard of reporting on Realitatea to never have been all that good, you can imagine how good we think it is now).
Anyway, the handsome host (the same one who hysterically told us that ‘Madonna has set foot on Romanian territory’ last summer) was quizzing his guests about low occupancy rates in the Romanian mountains last year, puzzled that hotels and pensions in the hills remained empty while those at seaside resorts and in Maramures enjoyed high occupancy rates.
The whole debate revolved around the idea that there must be something wrong with the pensions, or with the mountains themselves, even. That was the only explanation the panel of ‘experts’ came up with.
Market forces never seemed to cross anyone’s mind. The idea that there might simply be too many pensions in Romania’s mountains was a piece of lateral thinking nobody could come up with.
So they went around in circles banging on about how the government should do more for hotel and pension owners.
Spare me, please.
Anyone who has driven through Romania’s vast mountain region of late will be able to tell you that the problem is not a lack of tourists: it is simply that there are too many places to stay. In some parts (the Bran-Rucar route, for example), it seems every building for kilometres on end is a pension.
They can’t all be full the whole time. Like any business in any market, they can’t all succeed. Some will close. The level of occupancy of those that remain will increase.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Surely the problem is a lack of appropriate promotion. In normal countries there are a lot more pensiunes per square kilometre (there are very few outside the main tourist traps in Romania) and they are filled by coordinated promotional efforts carried out by local, regional and national authorities. This is not possible in Romania. I wrote an article about tourism recently and if anyone wants to add a comment (I particularly like those by Parmalat) I would be grateful: http://www.productive.ro/blog/the-romanian-tourism-trap.html
I wrote 2 comments on your article Rupert, initially they appeared as posted, however now they don’t appear anymore :-s
* it appears that nowadays if you want to get some media coverage you just make yourself a terrorist group and blow something up…
Personally I never did enjoy the mountains. I preferred the thrill of the [ridiculously priced] seaside. Or the thrill of Bucharest.
) ]
You know, something is very funny: people need to go to the seaside to get naked, everyone says “now we’re at the seaside, we can hang around in our underwear”.
Even underwear is not called underwear anymore when we’re at the seaside, it’s called swimwear.
It would be quite nice if we didn’t travel hundreds of km to the seaside to get naked, we could do it right here in Bucharest; and we could also use plain underwear, it looks just the same as swimwear.
[I think I said that before
Some will close and others will spring up in their wake. Tourism is bone-dry in the mountains, they have nothing left to offer…except bad roads. How about some activities, some mountain climbing lessons? Nope, just traditional food and drink again, hurray! Come to think of it, I kind of miss the mountains
but I use a tent, I like to rough it! Cheers!
‘Hotel and pension ownership seem to be the new national obsession in Romania’
You are not wrong there.
I do not remember the garden gnomes. I do remember the snail farms though – that was going to keep peasant farmers in gold teeth for decades – as well as llama farms.
I wonder how the llamas are doing?
What about ostrich farming? I encountered two such farms by chance recently.
Hotel and pension ownership seem to be the new national obsession in Romania regarding business initiatives. The legend among the locals is that there are easily accessible EU funds for such enterprises and many just throw themselves over the night into the hotel business hoping to make loads of money and secure their offspring for generations to come.
It just reflects the lack of imagination, vision and business culture prevailing among the gullible multitude in this corner of the EU. I remember the business craze of a decade ago- garden gnome production for export to the UK, which started apparently from rumors that the Brits are just queuing to buy that Romanian produced crap. I, even these days, sometime encounter in the countryside courtyards brimful with unsold gnomes smiling to the local peasants going about their business.
Another business craze was that of translation agencies of 5-7 years ago, when Romanians suddenly discovered that they are skilful in foreign languages. Many armed themselves with EU wide recognized translator/ interpreter certificates obtained through bribe and set up a myriad of agencies all over the country. It never ceases to amuse me when I read their desperate adverts- that they translate from and into any language. Apparently nowhere in the world is such a ‘high’ level of language skills as in the country of Miorita sheep.
During the stupid economic boom between 2005-09, the nation discovered its ‘great’ skills in real estate, public relations and head hunting business. Everyone is now able to see that the real estate fever was just a fraud of monumental proportions in which also many gullible westerners burned their fingers. The PR was populated with blondes calling themselves ‘senior executive’ that were a bit more than glorified prostitutes, while the headhunting business boasted a collection of 25 years old male and female so-called executives vying to staff the wave of multinationals assaulting at that time the elusive Romanian eldorado.
I am curious- which is going to be the next business idea craze after the hotel and pension ownership?- financial services for the rich westerners perhaps or cutting off the forests to sell to the Chinese?…
I think I’m right in saying that you basically get an EU (Sapard?) grant of half your renovation costs to turn your building into a Pension. That might explain it (I think you have to commit to keeping it as a pension for the first two years and after that you can take it off the market. Hence, I suspect that in the very near future a lot of these pensions will disappear from the market.
I have a friend here who is a potter, who set up his own business and was trying to make very nice pots and candle holders. Then someone asked him if he could make some gnomes. He did, and little by little his entire business became that, because that’s what sells. It’s dead depressing to see him churning out these horrible things, but that’s what the market is telling him to make, sadly. God knows who buys them (Romanian and German market appear to be the main), but sadly that is the market (unlike the pensions, which is mostly about free cash)