Assessing the sustainable room for growth for a particular Romanian tourism area of business: The case of accommodation businesses

Abstract

In recent years, the Romanian accommodation business sector has recorded a dramatic increase in accommodation units, but even under these circumstances it is below half of the average registered by the European Union. The study aims to evaluate whether there is still room for sustainable growth in this regard. For this purpose, the accounting-financial indicators have been assessed for an annual average of 3447 companies reporting every year to the European Union for 18 years, between 1999 and 2016, for all the accommodation units in Romania and the European Union. For data processing and to assess sustainable growth, we have used simple regression and resorted to the distance method and the geometric mean method to analyze competitiveness. The findings show a likelihood of sustainable growth of 20.6% in the development of Romanian accommodation businesses, in the light of the aspects analyzed, correlated to the EU average. Some managerial decision-making suggestions are provided at the end of the paper for accommodation businesses' sustainable growth, related to accounting-financial issues. For Romanian businesses, sustainable growth is promoted by the low level of staff costs and, to a lesser extent, by the investments made per employed person. For the corporate governance of these companies to recover growth space in terms of sustainability, managerial decisions should be taken to increase sales, profitability, production value and added value.