In Romania, a country of rich touristic heritage, the total contribution of tourism to the 2014 GDP was 4.8% and, according to the country report published by the World Tourism and Travel Council (WTTC), this contribution is expected to rise to only 5.1% over the next decade. Obviously, for an emerging economy with a high touristic endowment this current condition cannot be satisfying. In this paper we intend to accomplish a specific analysis of the tourism market evolution after its EU

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... n. Our undertaking starts from two complementary questions: How did the Romanian tourism market develop, following the country's EU accession? Are there any tourism development gaps between the country's counties? Our research includes assessments of both the touristic demand and supply by counties and the municipality of Bucharest, as well as of the county groupings resulted from a cluster analysis using 6 indices (2 for demand, 2 for supply and 2 aggregate ones). The assumptions we start from are that a positive impact has been induced on Romania's tourism after its accession into the EU, but in terms of its regional development, major development gaps between counties still persist and even deepen.