Holiday Climate Index: Urban—Application for Urban and Rural Areas in Romania

Abstract

Nature, landscape, relaxation, and outdoor activities are important motivations when choosing rural destinations for vacations. Therefore, when selecting a rural area as a vacation destination, we assume that climate features are important. We investigated the appropriateness of the holiday climate index: urban (HCI:urban) in quantitatively describing the relationship between climate and tourism fluxes in such destinations. We employed data from 94 urban and rural tourist destinations in Romania and correlated the monthly mean HCI:urban values with sectoral data (overnight tourists) for 2010–2018. The results show that weather and climate influenced tourism fluxes similarly in rural and urban destinations, supporting the hypothesis that HCI:urban may be used for rural areas as well. The information derived from HCI:urban may be useful for tourists when planning their vacations as well as for tourism investors in managing their businesses and reducing the weather and climate-related seasonality in tourism fluxes.

Activities as the critical link between motivation and destination choice in cultural tourism

“…In contrast, tourists who are likely to partake in indigenous cultural tourism activities are more likely to do so at hedonic destinations. In terms of the third main hypothesis, the results indicate that tourists' motivations for cultural tourism influence their likelihood of visiting specific types of destinations, supporting the results of Valea et al (2022), Ward (2014) and others. More specifically, our results show that experience as a motivator had a significant influence on tourists' likelihood to visit both utilitarian and hedonic destinations.…”

Climate Suitability for Tourism in Romania based on HCI: Urban Climate Index in the Near-Future Climate

“…The index has been developed by [28] with a focus on urban areas, in order to characterize the weather conditions suitable for outdoor leisure activities. Recently, it has been shown that the index is also appropriate for describing the climate attractivity for tourism in rural areas [5].…”

“…The results are analyzed as the relative difference (in percent) between RCP45 or RCP85 and HISTORICAL outputs of the regression model expressed as the mean number of overnights over the selected 20 years period. The analysis is applied to 41 urban areas and 53 rural touristic destinations; the latter are selected following the criteria described in [5].…”

“…Both datasets are available through CDS. In the framework of this study, the 2 m air temperature and relative humidity from the UERRA analysis at 12 UTC were used as proxies for daytime conditions [5]. The sectoral data is provided by National Institute for Statistics in Romania [3] in the form of monthly number of touristic overnights in each locality, starting from 2010; the data refers to accommodation units having more than 10 beds, regardless of the type of accommodation unit (e.g., hotel, agrotouristic boarding houses etc.).…”

“…Brașov -Prahova Valley tourist corridor (combining Brașov and Prahova counties) is in second place as a tourist attraction area of Romania; the center of Transylvania (Cluj, Sibiu and Mureș counties) registers a similar value, followed by Constanța, in the seaside [4]. Furthermore, about 62% of the total accommodation capacity is concentrated in 12 counties from a total of 41 counties [5]. Nevertheless, the governmental support for tourism development, seen as an economic priority of the country, encourages the revival of this sector and supports it through several directions like the development of ecological, natural and rural tourism, cultural programs, tourism education etc.…”