The Place of Religious Tourism in Romania's Tourist Industry

At global level, the industry of tourism represents the most dynamic activity sector, the most important generator of workplaces, and a source of recovery for the national economy. Specialists consider that, in the global perspective, travel and tourism, together with information technology and telecommunications will be the three industries of services with the highest turnover. Religious tourism is an essential component of cultural tourism. This form of tourism exists for centuries and shows some features of pilgrimage proper, but has undergone considerable changes, nevertheless. Nowadays, religious tourism involves high educational and cultural level of the tourists, which would allow appreciation of cultural-religious sights from the point of view of the architecture, value construction, spiritual significance and content of works of art. In the present paper the authors realized a comparative analysis of the Romanian religious tourism and the sector of tourism in general and highlighted the main issues this sector is currently confronted with.