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The Framework and Development of the Czech Tourist Industry and Travel Abroad after the Changes of Late 1989

Summary/Abstract: This article is concerned with changes in the tourist industry and travel abroad by Czechoslovaks and, after late 1989, Czechs as a particular expression of the political, economic, and socio-cultural transformation of that period, including the ‘return to Europe’. The structure of the article is based roughly on the basic groups of questions, which concern tourism abroad. The author first describes in broad outline the political and legislative processes of the gradual lifting of visa restrictions by the Czechoslovak authorities and the states of western Europe as well as the gradual liberalization and partial ‘denationalization’ of Czechoslovak currency policy and paperwork related to tourism. He then, in the second part, looks at the continuities and discontinuities of the forms of the tourist industry, particularly the transformation of the existing travel agencies (under the former Čedok monopoly) and the massive emergence of new travel agencies, as well as their rise and fall (for instance, Fischer Reisen, the travel agency of Václav Fischer). In combination with the history of travel-industry policy, the result seeks to be a contribution to the economic history of the country after the Changes of late 1989. In the third part of the article, the author traces the countries to which Czechoslovak and, later, Czech citizens travelled and in what number, and what their typical reasons were, from the beginning of the 1990s onwards. His analysis of the accessible quantitative data is followed by his interpretations of oral-history research intended, among other things, to discover the forms that travel abroad took after November 1989, how the participants perceived this travel, and what importance they attached to it.

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