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Volume XII |

The old hotels of Transylvania: heritage tourist resources

Abstract: Traveling within the Transylvanian hotels history, we discover the persistence of certain stories that even today fascinate thousands of guests from all over the world. The hotel, as tourist establishment with its main function the accommodation, keeps in the urban area, mainly due to the commerce development. An argument is the fact that in Transylvania, the first hotels have started to function in the fair towns: Sibiu, Cluj-Napoca and Brasov, in the central area of the city, nearby the fair.  In time, the hotels’ functionality has reached another extent. Nowadays, this type of tourist establishment can become a tourist sights itself. The 21st Century tourist is looking for: values of the past, old histories and experiences that the newly and modernly built hotels cannot offer because they have not had centuries to knit their story. The old hotels of Transylvania can be considered resources of cultural tourism due to their architecture, their uniqueness and persistence in time of their own stories. The present study aims to identify the hotels from the 18th and 19th centuries from the main towns of Transylvania, tourist establishments which can represent important tourist resources for the cultural tourism of the studied region.

Volume XI |

The individualization of the hotel as tourist attraction in the urban area of Transylvania

Abstract: The purpose of the present study is to emphasize the importance of the hotels as accommodation establishments within the urban area of Transylvania. The study involves ten counties (Alba, Bistrița-Năsăud, Brașov, Cluj, Covasna, Harghita, Hunedoara, Mureș, Sibiu and Sălaj), focusing on their towns. The geographic distribution of the hotels highlights the differences that can be observed between the studied counties. These dissimilarities started to appear due to the different tourist potential and the economic development. With more than two centuries of tradition in the background, the hotels in Transylvania experienced, along their evolution, a series of transformations that led to changes in the structure of their offer. In the urban context, the hotel stands as a main element when defining the city’s tourist role, also taking into account that for the city, the presence of hotels, from different categories and with different levels of comfort, is imperative.