Analele Universităţ ţii din Oradea, Seria Geog grafie Year XXVII, no. 2/2017 (December), pp. 230-235 ISSN 1221-1273, E-ISSN 2065-3409 Article no. 272106-751 http://istgeorelint.uoradea.ro/Reviste/Anale/anale.htm ANALYSIS OF THE LICENSED TOURIST GUIDES’ EVOLUTION OF ROMANIA AND CRITICAL ISSUES AFFECTING THEIR ACTIVITY Corina TĂTAR  Ph.D. Lecturer, University of Oradea, Department of Geography, Tourism and Territorial Planning, Str. Universitatii, nr.1, 410087, Oradea, Romania, corina_criste_78@yahoo.com Grigore Vasile HERMAN University of Oradea, Department of Geography, Tourism and Territorial Planning, 1 University St., 410087 Oradea, Romania, e-mail: grigoreherman@yahoo.com Alina GIURGIU Professional Tourist Guide, WFTGA Accredited Trainer School for Tourist Guides Oradea, e-mail: tourguides2000@gmail.com Abstract: The study refers to the licensed tourist guides of Romania during 1998-2016, namely their numerical evolution during this time series as well as an analysis of their numerical evolution by different types of tourist guides, be they national, local or specialized. The statistical analysis showed an increment from 24 tourist guides in the year 1998 to 4,335 licensed tour guides in 2016. The analysis is supplemented by current issues and shortcomings affecting the tourist guiding activity of Romania, as revealed by the tourist guides present at the annual tourist guides’ national conferences, various stringent problems raised and debated within these encounters and highlighted by this study as well as proposals for a better functioning for this segment of tourism entrepreneurs. Key words: licensed tourist guides, numerical evolution, tourist police, industry shortcomings * * * * * * LITERATURE REVIEW Tour guides play a pivotal role in the experience of visitors who undertake a guided tour (Weiler and Black, 2014), a character being born and evolving along with the emancipation of modern societies. Research on tour guiding has also developed quite recently, a trailblazer in this sense being Cohen’s (1985) work, up to the latest researches focused on tour guiding (Xu and McGehee, 2017; Hansen and Mossberg, 2017; Lee, 2017; Kotiloglu et al., 2017), the sustainability of tourist guides’ activity (Hu and Wall, 2014; Weiler and Kim, 2011) and customer satisfaction referring to tourist guides activity (Albayrak, 2017). A tourist guide is defined as a person with a broad knowledge whose primary role is to inform, thus performing the function of an educator. According to Weiler and Black (2014) a tourist guide is a professional who guides groups around venues or places of interest and interprets  Corresponding Author