Ionel Mugurel Jitea

Changes in Tourists’ Perception towards Visiting Bucegi Natural Park

The aim of the paper is to investigate if tourists’ preferences toward visiting Bucegi Natural Park, Romania, have changed over time. The study seeks to elicit from the ‘consumer’, who is the tourist, useful information for management decisions. Tourists’ preferences were analyzed using the choice experiments method within two studies. The park is presented as a set of several attributes with different states that tourists may be willing or not to experiences during their visit. The marginal willingness to pay is obtained for each attribute included in the choice set offered to respondents for evaluation. The set of attributes differ over the two studies to capture tourists’ satisfaction over time in respond to management changes at the level of the park. The changes in behavior indicate that over the years people became more aware of the importance of sustainability of Bucegi Natural Park and also that the park administration has taken actions towards an optimal recreation use.