Recovery in Volume, Not in Structure? Post-Pandemic Seasonal Concentration of Tourism Demand and Operating Capacity in Romania

Tourism seasonality affects destination sustainability by concentrating demand into a short period and leaving accommodation capacity underused off-season. This study examines whether Romanian tourism reverted to its pre-pandemic seasonal pattern once volumes recovered, comparing 2019 with 2025 on monthly INS TEMPO-Online series for arrivals, overnight stays and net occupancy, from which operating capacity is derived. Concentration is measured with four complementary indices, nationally, for exhaustive partitions by visitor origin and accommodation category, and for four destination case studies. Arrivals exceeded the 2019 level by 4.89% while overnight stays returned to it, the average length of stay fell by 5.25%, operating capacity rose by 14.03%, and net occupancy fell in every month from 34.15% to 29.76%. The national Gini index of arrivals rose by only 1.20%, less than the change recorded between the pre-pandemic calendar years 2018 and 2019; counterfactual reweighting attributes this near-stability to offsetting component movements. Evidence for a change in national structure therefore rests on the seasonal-group and dispersion measures rather than on month-level inequality. Six of twelve series exceed the pre-pandemic year-on-year change on all three tested measures, among them operating capacity, non-resident arrivals and the seaside cases. The analysis is descriptive; national aggregates understate the redistribution it documents.