Romania’s Unclassified Tourist Inns : A Spark of Rural Authenticity?

Today's Romanian tourists do not seem to clearly differentiate one type of accommodation facility from another. Given this, the hospitality services providers either intentionally or by mistake promote their units as a different type than the one they are registered and classified under. Perhaps this is why boarding houses or villas are promoted online as hotels or why concrete villas replace rural boarding houses and invade and disrupt rural landscapes. Moreover, with an inadequate and incomplete situation of Romania's accommodation establishments, doubled by a weak legal framework regarding the development of lodging facilities, it becomes merely impossible to keep the development of the supply under control. In this context, when most of the most popular types of accommodation facilities present in Romania seem to have lost their identity, we have identified tourist inns as a potential breath of rural authenticity. Making use of an analysis grid, a website-based investigation is run among the accommodation facilities identified as more or less related to tourist inns. The main purpose of our research is to determine the extent to which these lodgings can contribute to the authenticity of the Romanian rural tourism