* Next year, Thomas Cook will begin once again bringing in German, Swiss and Austrian tourists to Romania

Elena Udrea is decided to put back Bucharest on the map for European tourists. A spa center and a revised logo are her first objectives, but it is obvious that the plans are far bigger. The Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism (MDRT) intends to obtain a partnership for the construction of a spa center in Bucharest, Elena Udrea announced: "There aren"t many cities that have spa capabilities like Bucharest does. We haven"t abandoned the project to build a spa center in the north of Bucharest. The problem is that the spa resource is owned by a private operator. We need a partnership with it to build a spa center in Bucharest. We will also talk to the Ministry of Health to exploit the Ana Aslan Center. For the moment, we are trying to attract investors, but since we don"t own the spa resource, the decision is not up to us. However, investors who invest more than 15 million Euros in tourism may request grants from the government". In the beginning of June 2011, the Ministry of Regional Development and Tourism signed the contract for the marketing plan (strategic and operational) for the city of Bucharest in the tourism sector, for the 2011-2015 period, with the consortium Detente Consultants SAS/Detente Consultants SRL, for an amount of 101,952 Euros including VAT. The promotion of the tourist brand is as good as done, with Elena Udrea jokingly announcing that she has already thought about a "smaller leaf". Next month, the MDRT will present the mayoralty of Bucharest with a marketing plan for Bucharest, which will present the main avenues of promotion." The mayoralty showed no interest in promoting Bucharest, so, based on its attributions, the Ministry initiated this marketing plan. We have requested the company an increase of at least 4.8% a year, an av