Students’s Visitors – Among the Unexplored Types of Local Tourism?

Abstract

Universities have the capacity to attract students from a vast geographical area, thus resulting in new residences for its host city. This is a well-known effect especially for major and prestigious universities located in relatively small locations. Babeș-Bolyai University in the city of Cluj-Napoca is such an example. Using our survey data, we explore a form of local tourism left rather unexplored – the students’ visitors. Our results show that only 9.3% of these visitors spend the night at a hotel or hostel making this type of tourism little known and mostly untraceable for official tourism data. An estimated 7.5 million Euros were spent only by the BBU students’ visitors in the city of Cluj-Napoca in the year of 2015.