The Tourism Behaviour Of Bucharest's Population

INTRODUCTION

Tourism through its content represents a characteristic phenomenon of our civilization, one of the major components of economic and social life which polarizes the interest of an increasing number of individuals. Responsive to the transformations our contemporary world, tourism evolves under their influence, its dynamics integrating into the general developing process.

The tourism phenomenon is, essentially, a temporary and spontaneous migration with a private character, with the purpose of satisfying the individual need of consumption for specific products and services, during and at the destination point of the travel. Generally speaking, „traveling" is considered a prestige notion, „a good in itself", tourism being considered as a break from daily life, which confirms and improves life, awarding a stronger importance to the one practicing it.

In the present, the companies, including those activating in the tourism field, are obliged to restructure their objectives and market strategies radically. Although until not so long ago, the companies were operating in the conditions of a stable, well known competition and customer, at the present time they are activating in the conditions of rapid changes in the competition, technological processes, security conditions, the appearance of new laws and commercial policies and also a gradual decrease in the customer fidelity.

The fact that these days the tourism offer has amplified and has diversified must be taken into account, beside the existing one emerging the private offer, agro tourism, and, we must not forget the foreign offer, which is attractive and financially acceptable. Also, the customer has changed from the point of view of the mentality, information horizon and financial possibilities. The tourists will choose those offers which correspond best to their expectations and needs, their decision being based on the capacity of perception of value and usefulness.

The success or failure of a company on the tourism market is strictly bound to the degree to which the customer's actual and potential behavior is known and taken into consideration when fundamenting marketing strategies.

By studying the behavior of the client, the marketing specialists are trying to find out the way customers choose and the factors which influence their choice. They buy products and services both for facing the day to day demands of life and for indicating their place in the society, for expressing their personality, for proving their value or for showing displaying their wealth. In other words, the products and services are bought not only for satisfying their physical needs, but also the sociological and psychological needs.

Trying to understand the customers is difficult, but essential. For example, the tourism agency must "produce" tourism programs and build their image according to the needs and wishes of the consumers. They are influenced by a wide range of hidden reasons, their behavior being based on a series of values and attitudes, on the way they perceive the world and their place in the world, on the way they see themselves and on the way they wish the others to see them, on reason and economic sense, on whims and impulses.

Thus, in order to better understand the tourism phenomenon, we must first understand better the behavior of the tourists and of the persons who want to become tourists. The development and the testing of the models which help in explaining the precedents and consequences of the human behavior represents an important priority in studying and researching in the field of tourism. The information obtained is very valuable, both at microeconomic level, in designing the new tourism products and in marketing promotion campaigns

The fundamental idea of this paper is the following: tourism, an economical-social phenomenon, is influenced by specific factors, which act on the market in at least three instances: a) it conditions the behavior and implicitly the volume and structure of demand and consumption; b)differenciates the behavior of consumers, thus the demand and consumption of some categories of consumers differenciate from those from other categories, because of the differences existing in the degree of education, income level, age, etc.; c) integrates the behavior of the consumer, the demand and its consumption in a certain consumption profile, which exists in a close dependence with the sociological characteristics of the group ( identified in the present study with the help of socio-ocupational categories). So, it appears necessary to debate the theme in a double stance: on the one hand, the study presents a sociological approach, reffering to the ansamble of the population of Bucharest city, and, on the other hand, an economical approach, from marketing perspective, materializing in objectives of research and in interpreting its results so that the current situation from tourism field be improved.

As a conclusion, getting to know the way that individuals take decisions concerning tourism products, their information sources, the way they structure and evaluate this information, their consumption behavior, meaning the sums of money they are willing to allocate to tourism consumption, can offer important advantages in business practice and in the way that the tourism movement is generally understood.

CHAPTER 1

BASIC CONCEPTUAL ELEMENTS FOR TOURISM STUDIES

Taking into consideration that any research field must develop after general accepted criteria and to operate using specific notions and fully understood by all interested parties, of a great importance for elaborating tourism studies is the realization of a terminological/conceptual standardization, which should take into account the most important terms concerning the chosen theme. Thus, in the following, we will reffer to the content of the tourism concept, but also to some terms usually used in the current language, but to which specialists grant strict meanings, terms like recreation, travel, visit, excursion,at the tipology of travels, (the classification of tourism forms representing a great importance to identifying the behavior of the visitor), then to what they buy on the tourism market, namely tourism products, and finally we will analyse the essential factor in forming the tourism demand - the tourism motivation, with its main influence variables: the available spare time, the individual income level, age and lifestyle of individuals

1.1 The content of the tourism concept

The term tourism has a complex content, specialists attributing different meanings,