The hospitality industry is one of the most dynamic sectors of contemporary society with a pronounced role in the globalization process. Nowadays, hospitality industry does not only face the challenges of the economic crisis, but also the changes of the market, in consumer’s behavior and in technological trends. Accounting, as a language of business, must keep pace with developments in the areas investigated, and the need to promote universally recognized concepts proves its usefulness more and more. When an entity’s management team is facing difficult problems such as the economic and financial ones, a situation frequent in the hospitality industry given the complexity of these activities, a need is naturally felt, for a set of accounting principles which are not similar with the immutable laws of nature from physics and chemistry.

The contribution of accounting to the fulfillment of the strategic objectives of the managers in hospitality and tourism industry is manifested also in the form of providing the information necessary for monitoring, for determining the degree of liability and the effect produced at various work places, which allows detection of internal reserves, of unnecessary and uneconomic spending and of losses. Also, accounting has developed the capability of knowing the economic and financial situation, so that it can provide, in optimal conditions, the information necessary to make the most appropriate decisions. Moreover, the purpose of accounting is to make the information and its methods a targeting tool, a “dashboard”, an advisor, in order to determine the conditions in which the economic entity operates at both micro- and macroeconomic level.

These were the reasons that led to the start of our scientific approach, aiming at a radiography of the impact of accounting information on managerial decisions in the hospitality industry in Romania. This article is primarily a theoretical one in which we intend to review the literature on the topic of accounting information in the hospitality industry and of management accounting practices in this sector.