GASTRONOMIC TOURISM, AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DIVERSIFYING THE TOURIST OFFER IN THE SIBIU AREA
In the tourists' motivation to choose a holiday destination, gastronomy is gaining important insights, which has led to an increasing supply of quality-based local products and a stronger market growth. Gastronomy has become one of the most dynamic segments on the international tourism scene. Gastronomic tourism begins to be viewed as a phenomenon as a new tourist product itself, due to the fact that more than one third of the expenses in the tourist offer of the destination are made food. This shows the importance of gastronomy in the quality of leisure experience. Gastronomic tourism gains more and more importance as motivating the future in choosing the holiday destination. Proof of this is that, according to recent research (Euromonitor, 2018), eating in restaurants is the second favourite activity for international athletes visiting the US and occupying the first place for tourists from North America in their recreational trips to other countries. for these reasons, we developed a questionnaire that was applied to a total of 234 respondents, but randomly among the visitors at the Tourism Fair, which was dashed in November 2017 in Bucharest. The survey aimed at identifying the position of the fish and the gastronomy occupied in the motivation of the tourists to visit Sibiu and the surrounding areas. The results revealed that the traditional gastronomy, through its multicultural aspect, represents the second or third op visiting Sibiu. Certainly this will become even more visible, given the designation for 2019 of Sibiu as a European gastronomic region.