How Romania's tourism breathes

Four shapes, one year

Every locality has its own year

For every locality, INS counts how many nights tourists spend there each month. Dividing each month by the year's total produces a "signature": twelve bars, one per month, January through December, each bar's height proportional to its share of that locality's year. The tallest bar is the busiest month; bars close to equal height mean a year with no dominant season.

INS reports at the level of the administrative locality, not the resort. Mamaia, the largest resort on the coast, has no figures of its own: it's a beach district of Constanța municipality, and the figures above are the whole city's, so they likely reflect, without separately proving, Mamaia's summer. Băile Felix likewise doesn't appear separately; it's folded into the figures for Sânmartin commune, in Bihor county. Predeal, by contrast, is a whole locality with its own signature, a surprisingly flat one for a ski resort: winter and summer roughly balance out, instead of one dominating the other. Bucharest is the flattest of the four, a city that draws tourists all year for reasons that have nothing to do with season.

Tourism regimes · the clearest split

Two tourist Romanias

You might expect Romanian tourism to have many patterns: summer, winter/ski, spa, city-break, weekend, nearly season-free. A clustering algorithm (k-means), run on the monthly signature of all 712 localities, separates them most cleanly into just two groups, with a silhouette score of 0.49, by far the best score among every split tested, from two to nine groups. A "weekend Romania" cannot be shown from this data: INS counts by month, not by day of the week.

The first group, 597 localities, gathers nearly every large city and most mountain resorts, including, surprisingly, the ski towns. Sinaia, Predeal and Bran do have real winter and summer peaks, but the two balance out into a year that looks, statistically, almost as flat as a city with no tourist season at all. The second group, much smaller at 115 localities, is dominated by the coast: on average, over half its nights land in July and August.

A closer look

Split into three, and a third shape appears

Splitting into three groups separates less cleanly: the silhouette score drops to 0.28, against 0.49 for two groups, a sign the boundaries between groups are less sharp. With that caveat, the new shape is still recognisable: a category of 224 localities with a long summer, less sharp than the coast, spa towns, and lake and mountain localities with an extended summer. Of the 224 localities in this category, 164 come from the nearly-whole-year group and 60 from the coast-dominated group — the third shape redistributes localities from both earlier groups, not just one. Sânmartin (includes Băile Felix), Băile Herculane, Vatra Dornei and Băile Olănești are among the largest.