Tourism Planning and Development in Eastern Europe

This book outlines contemporary strategies for tourism development in post-socialist countries, reviewing the opportunities and challenges as well as initiatives and approaches to sustainability. Reviewing development and planning across Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Romania, it also considers post-COVID tourism.

Three decades ago, the hypermobility of tourists from the days before the global pandemic was truly unthinkable in Eastern Europe. The borders were closed and the region isolated from the rest of the world. Despite an extraordinary transformation of tourism in the area since, Eastern Europe remains under-explored in tourism studies. This book fills the gap by outlining contemporary strategies for tourism development in post-socialist countries, considering the opportunities and challenges as well as the initiatives and approaches to sustainability.Reviewing tourism development and planning across Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Ukraine, this book: offers a contemporary insight into Eastern European tourism, with a wide range of case studies from inter-disciplinary and single-disciplinary perspectives; uses varied methodological approaches and research methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, informal conversations, document analysis, netnography, questionnaires and secondary data, to form an interesting and diverse treatise; considers post-COVID tourism and the significant role of tourism stakeholders in its redevelopment.Illuminating the various economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts that tourism has created, this book is a valuable reference for researchers and students of tourism and related disciplines, as well as anyone interested in the development of Eastern Europe.