Romania: Creating European and Global Networks

In the final months of 1970, the ONT–Carpathians, through its Office for Research and International Analysis, put together a study about the international context of tourism and its influence on the tourist market in Romania.⁸ The report emphasized that international tourism soared from 71 million in 1960 to 153 million in 1969 and that Europe had the greatest traffic, with 50.4 million tourists in 1960 and 112.5 million tourists in 1969.⁹ Besides noting the reasons for this increase (more free time due to paid vacations, increased income, more affordable flights, etc.), the research stressed that income from international tourism outpaced that of industrial exports in European countries.¹⁰ This echoed the great potential of international tourism in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Furthermore, the study emphasized that “the growth that we notice in international tourism in the last two decades, as well as its [prospects] for the future, confirms that nowadays tourism has become a routine activity in our lives, a basic prerequisite of modernity closely connected with the political, economic, scientific, and cultural development of the human world.”¹¹ In the 1970s, Romanian specialists regarded tourism as synonymous with economic development, but also as a phenomenon with ideological undertones because traveling could help promote world peace and cultural understanding.

Yet they noted that despite tourism’s promising global prospects, Eastern Europe lagged behind other regions. The arrivals of foreign tourists to Romania and Eastern Europe, in general, were still modest when analyzed in the European context. Thus, the ONT–Carpathians study noted that in 1969 only 5.8 million tourists out of the total 81 million tourists who went abroad in Europe traveled to Eastern Europe, which was a meager 7 percent.¹² Of the 5.8 million Western tourists who visited Eastern Europe, only half a million traveled to Romania.¹³ But despite what looked like limited growth, international tourism in Romania was still on the rise in the early 1970s. A positive aspect noted in the ONT–Carpathians report was that tourism in Romania had soared three times more than the European average (but at a similar or lower pace compared to Yugoslavia or Spain).¹⁴ One source of growth came from tourism with neighboring socialist countries. In 1970, Romanian tourist specialists hoped to attract more Czechoslovakian tourists as domestic restrictions prevented them from traveling to Western countries in the aftermath of the 1968 Prague Spring.¹⁵ But the specialists’ advice fell on deaf ears, and on the ground things were quite different because socialist policymakers continued to prioritize tourists from capitalist countries.¹⁶ A Czech tourist who traveled to the Black Sea Coast in May 1972 complained about the quality of food and service in restaurants, adding that “I told my family to go to Bulgaria because they welcome you with open arms, while in Romania we are met with the same unfriendly attitude. If we were West Germans, everyone working here would have tried to please us.”¹⁷ Because Romanian political elites were committed to attracting more Western tourists (with their coveted hard currencies), socialist solidarities became less important, and tourists from neighboring socialist countries were poorly treated. This stance extended to actual tourism practitioners like hotel clerks, hence the discriminatory treatment. But because of Romania’s geographical location in Eastern Europe and its belonging to the socialist Bloc, tourists from socialist countries remained a majority. Against this backdrop, prioritizing tourists from capitalist countries appears to have been an uphill battle.

This posed serious questions for Romanian tourist specialists, who had to balance political predicaments that required higher amounts of hard currency from international tourism and the economic realities of the actual market. Whereas in the mid-1960s, 60 percent of revenues came from tourists from capitalist countries, this percentage dwindled in the 1970s and was reversed in the 1980s.¹⁸ In the 1960s it made sense to prioritize Western tourists, especially as studies in tourism showed it was not the number of tourists that mattered most, but how much they were spending during their vacations. To this end, Romanian tourist experts noted that Scandinavian tourists (especially Swedes and Danes) tended to spend the highest amount of money and that promotional campaigns should prioritize these tourists.¹⁹ As a matter of fact, the ONT–Carpathians’ research noted that tourist expenses in EEC countries rose three times between 1958 and 1967.²⁰ However, for 1970 predictions were rather pessimistic. High inflation and the volatility of the US economy were expected to halt tourism growth. The report noted that only the number of tourists coming from Northern Europe would increase, while the number of tourists from other regions, and especially from the United States, was expected to remain the same or decrease.²¹ Yet one promising aspect in the eyes of Romanian tourist experts was the signing of tourist agreements between Germany and the USSR, along with the establishment of charter flights between Frankfurt and Leningrad, Frankfurt and Moscow, and Munich and Kyiv.²² The Romanian tourist experts were optimistic that the strengthening of the Deutsche Mark in relation to the US dollar would boost the West German tourist market, and these tourists would visit Eastern Europe, especially Romania, in growing numbers.²³ These predictions were to a certain degree met—except for a brief stalemate in 1976, the number of West German tourists did increase throughout the 1970s.²⁴ At the same time, encouraged by the growth in the number of tourists from the capitalist West and the revenues they brought in the 1960s, political elites continued to prioritize Western tourists in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, although the number of Western tourists began to drop. This was the outcome of an old preconception of policymakers in Romania, who regarded economic relations with the capitalist West as an escape from the political and economic monopoly of the Soviet Union over socialist Eastern Europe. But as the ONT–Carpathians report showed, this was hardly an original approach, as the Soviet Union itself had strengthened its connections with the West in the 1960s because Nikita Khrushchev wished to enhance the availability of consumer goods in the USSR.²⁵

Besides mirroring the political and economic détente between the socialist East and capitalist West, the 1970 analysis of tourist specialists from the National Institute for Research and Development in Tourism shows that Romania was clearly positioning itself within the European tourist market, which at that time was the largest tourist market worldwide. But it did not lose sight of the United States or neighboring socialist countries. In fact, the offers of contending tourist countries (Austria, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and Yugoslavia) were not considered based on their political system, capitalist or socialist, but based only on alphabetical order. The space allocated to each country in this analysis depended on its tourist development and its degree of competitiveness in regard to tourism. Hence, the research paid special attention to Bulgaria, with which Romania shared access to the Black Sea Coast. This aspect placed Bulgaria and Romania in close competition when it came to international tourism. The ONT–Carpathians report noted that Bulgaria planned to build Albena, a new resort on the Black Sea Coast north of the Golden Sands resort, while the European Tourism Club (which also operated in Romania until 1968) had rented Russalka Holiday Village on the Black Sea Coast for ten years. The better promotion, along with an attractive offer, managed to draw a considerable number of American and Western European tourists to this resort, the ONT–Carpathians study pointed out. A two-week, round-trip vacation between Paris and Varna cost only $200.²⁶ Also, the Bulgarian tourist office negotiated with Hilton and Intercontinental to build a major hotel in Sofia.²⁷ In terms of strategy, Balkantourist, the state agency in charge of tourism, wanted to attract both automotive tourists and those who flew to Bulgaria. For tourists who traveled by car, it offered 50 liters of free gasoline. This amount could increase contingent on the time tourists spent in Bulgaria and reached 100 liters for a twenty-day stay.²⁸ For tourists who chose to fly round-trip to Bulgaria between Copenhagen and Burgas (also on the Black Sea Coast) through Bulair, the brand-new Bulgarian charter company, the cost was only $50.²⁹ Bulgaria also had special package deals with Hertz that included the airfare for London–Vienna–Sofia and a rental car for up to 500 km that covered insurance and gas at $69. Moreover, Hertz opened offices in Varna and Sofia.³⁰

This was daunting for the Romanian officials as Romania did not yet have a special airline company to operate charter flights (they were operated by TAROM, the national airline, sometimes with much difficulty)³¹ or special deals with international car rental and hotel firms. Tourist experts used the example of Bulgaria (or Yugoslavia, which had a similar charter firm) to encourage government and party officials to make similar decisions, as they thought this would increase international tourism in socialist Romania. But as Bulgarians had easy access to the Soviet oil pipeline, Romania, because of its economic “independence” policy, had to look for more expensive alternatives in the Middle East and could not offer the same facilities to tourists traveling by car.

As Nicolae Ceaușescu, the newly appointed general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), continued his predecessor’s nationalist policies and embarked on import substitution industrialization, the rift with the Soviets increased. In 1968, Romania was the only Warsaw Pact member country to oppose the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, and its image significantly improved in the eyes of the Western public. As import substitution industrialization required certain initial investments in technology bought from Western countries, Romania needed hard currencies to pay for these materials. Tourists from capitalist countries promised to deliver the coveted hard currencies, which were then used to achieve the regime’s larger economic goals. This view was the backbone of the Romanian political elites’ economic policy in the 1970s. The emphasis on tourists from capitalist countries also required an enhanced infrastructure, so the Romanian authorities continued to invest in international tourism. As a result, 4 billion lei were allocated to tourism during the 1971–1975 five-year plan.³² This investment paid off as the number of both Western and Eastern tourists who visited Romania in the 1970s and the revenues they brought gradually increased. In terms of the number of tourists, despite a decline in 1976 and 1977 (especially of Western tourists), 7 million tourists visited Romania in 1980.³³

Romania’s orientation toward the capitalist West was reflected in its tourist promotion throughout the 1960s and 1970s and the distribution of tourist offices abroad. In the early 1970s, Romania had sixteen tourist offices abroad, of which only two were in socialist countries: Czechoslovakia and the GDR.³⁴ Tourist offices were tasked with establishing formal and informal contacts with tourist firms and offering practical information to individual tourists, like how to find accommodation and transportation, or what to visit while in Romania. From a hierarchical point of view, tourist offices depended on the Ministry of Tourism (established in 1971), but they also worked closely with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The network of tourist offices was supplemented by a chain of tourist bureaus established in each Romanian embassy in countries that sent tourists to Romania. In 1978, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest asked embassies to have at least one diplomat in charge of tourism promotion and marketing.³⁵ Tourist bureaus were supposed to establish connections with tourist firms in their respective countries; to organize activities that would promote Romanian culture, cuisine, and products (especially those that were sold in Comturist shops);³⁶ and put together biannual reports about how contractual agreements with firms in a given country were met and about the measures to be undertaken in order to make sure those firms would send the promised number of tourists to Romania. They were also advised to involve Romanian emigré communities by asking them to promote Romania as a tourist destination or attempting to lure them into coming back as tourists.³⁷

Establishing tourist offices abroad was a common practice in other socialist countries as well.³⁸ Such institutions were meant to function as a linchpin of tourism in the countries of the capitalist West and elsewhere. Because of this, they were regarded as an important means of propaganda. At the tenth meeting of tourist delegates from socialist countries, which took place in Moscow on April 7–11, 1975, a common program for the entire Eastern Bloc regarding tourism and information abroad was suggested.³⁹As this idea resembled the 1950s Soviet claim of supremacy in the socialist world, Romanian officials hardly agreed with such a proposition. As a result, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent an urgent note to Romanian embassies and tourist offices in London, Vienna, Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Washington, Paris, Rome, The Hague, Bonn, Berlin, Stockholm, Zurich, and Prague that asked them to follow only the Ministry of Tourism’s guidelines when it came to tourist advertising and promotion.⁴⁰ This episode reflected Romania’s balancing act between Soviet hegemony and the capitalist West, which was a defining feature of the Romania’s economic and political trajectory in the postwar period. At the same time, it confirmed Romania’s quest for autonomy within the Comecon and Eastern Bloc and its nationalist stance when it came to foreign relations, which also applied to international tourism.⁴¹

For Romanian political and economic elites, developing international tourism with the capitalist West was not only a way to pursue its pragmatic goal of acquiring hard currencies, but also a way to present itself as a promoter of world peace and international solidarity. One arena for this endeavor was the World Tourism Organization (WTO). Founded in 1975 on the basis of the former International Union of Official Travel Organizations, founded in 1947, it was meant to create a forum for discussion about how to improve tourism management and training, as well as to promote interregional cooperation and learning exchanges.⁴² Romania was an active participant in the meeting that established the WTO in April 1975, when Traian Lupu, a director in the Ministry of Tourism and head of the Romanian delegation, was elected as the president of the European Working Group within the organization.⁴³ For Romania, membership in this organization meant access to information about the newest trends in tourism as well as the possibility of gaining hard currencies. Bucharest offered training in tourism and hospitality to trainees from the Global South, especially from Africa, which was paid for in US dollars by the WTO as part of its program for developing countries. In a report of the Economic Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Romania (CC of PCR) (from December 1984, which justified the membership fee of the organization, it was mentioned that as a member of the WTO Romania managed “to establish contacts at the state level, to participate in learning exchanges regarding international tourism, to get a hold on the most recent and up-to-date studies about global tourist forecasts, to benefit from international norms regarding the classification of tourist establishments, to establish connections with large tourist agencies and travel firms, to organize tourist training for hotel workers from various emergent tourist countries and to put together studies for the WTO, which were all paid in hard currencies.”⁴⁴ Indeed, two training sessions organized in May and June 1980 and attended by tourist managers and workers from twenty-nine African countries helped Romania build a good reputation among the participants. It also “made the WTO General Secretary decide [to] keep organizing this training in Romania,” according to a report about the WTO presented in the Executive Committee of the PCR in 1981.⁴⁵

Membership in the WTO helped Romania establish direct connections with countries in the so-called Global South. As Romania was labeling itself as a developing country for economic reasons—within the WTO, Romania asked to be included in the IV category for developing countries in order to benefit from a lower membership fee—tourist relations with African countries as well as countries in the Middle East and Latin America held both ideological and economic undertones. On the one hand, Romania helped these countries with tourism in order to prove socialism’s moral superiority in the Cold War struggle with capitalism, but on the other Romanian officials also regarded these countries as markets for Romanian tourism. A 1975 study by the National Institute for Research and Development in Tourism argued that “In order [for Romana] to continue having outstanding results in the tourism sector we need to diversify the sources of income from our tourism. This is why, beyond the regular markets of developed countries, we also need to pay attention to the developing countries.”⁴⁶ This position was justified by an increase in the number of tourists from the Global South to Romania. For instance, the number of tourists from Latin America to Romania increased by 227 percent in 1973 and by 323 percent in 1974, while the revenue in hard currencies from these tourists rose by 1128 percent in 1974. Moreover, in 1974, tourists from Latin America spent more money than visitors from West Germany in Băile Herculane, a spa resort in southwestern Romania.⁴⁷

Romania’s drift toward global tourist entanglements in the 1970s was epitomized by the establishment of the Pan Am flight from New York to Bucharest, in 1971. The Pan Am flight landed for the first time in Bucharest on May 5, 1971, after two layovers, one in Frankfurt and another in Belgrade. The airplane, a Boeing 707 piloted by Romanian-born Nicholas Tampoși, was carrying journalists including Hugh Downs, Barbara Walters, and Joe Garagiola; some businessmen; and a dozen of American tourists. After landing, Tampoși presented the key of New York City to the mayor of Bucharest, Dumitru Popa, as a symbolic bringing together of the two cities.⁴⁸

The negotiations for opening a direct line between New York and Bucharest began in 1968, but reaching an agreement was quite convoluted because it required negotiations at the highest levels of government. The discussions were held in Washington, DC, in December 1968 between delegations of the US and Romanian governments. The main issues to be agreed upon included the routes of operation, the selling of tickets and their price, the activities of the two airlines’ representatives in each country, and the conversion and remittance of revenue.⁴⁹ Initially, negotiations failed because Romania requested flying reciprocity to the United States, which was denied. The Air Transport Association of America finally signed an agreement with the Romanian government in December 1973 that allowed TAROM to operate a Bucharest–New York flight as well. This flight remained in place until 1991; it was suspended due to the post-1989 economic crisis in Romania.

Besides the publicity around the Intercontinental Hotel and Pan Am’s New York–Bucharest flight (which were regularly mentioned in the corporations’ advertising materials), various sights in Romania were promoted as well. One of them was Peleș Castle, a former royal palace located in Sinaia in the Prahova Valley, a tourist region the socialist government also sought to promote.

Pan Am’s promotion picked up some of the themes advertised by the Romanian socialist government. One of them was Romanian history with a focus on the ancient era, especially the pre-Roman conquest period. As the socialist regime emphasized nationalism it deemed this time period as epitomizing specific national traits.⁵⁰ Hence, it was no surprise that in its advertising catalogue Pan Am depicted a waiter dressed up in a presumably traditional Dacian outfit. Yet this image was a far cry from the government’s desire for authenticity; it was instead a commercialized view of Romania’s past used to attract American tourists.

But this was not the only case in which history was twisted to lure American or West European tourists to socialist Romania. The legend of Dracula was another glaring occurrence. Starting in the 1960s, a number of Western tourist agencies, especially in the United States, were interested in developing a “Dracula tour.” In the 1970s, the Western film industry rediscovered the myth of Dracula, interest in which was considerably high among Western tourists.⁵¹ Interest in this story was more common among Western tourists since socialist tourists remained partly unaware of the myth built around the fictional character of Dracula.⁵² Romanian guidebooks published abroad never explicitly mentioned the story, but a Dracula literature and popular culture developed particularly in Great Britain and the United States.⁵³ In 1972, Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu’s book In Search of Dracula enjoyed some popularity in the United States, and the New York–based General Tours travel agency and Pan Am decided to develop such a tour.⁵⁴ The trip would last eighteen days and cost $980 USD.⁵⁵ This trend spread quickly, and at the end of the 1970s, two tourist agencies in Barcelona offered trips to Romania advertised as following “the route of Count Dracula.”⁵⁶ However, as the Romanian authorities were unhappy about promoting Romania as a “land of vampires,” a compromise was reached.⁵⁷ According to a US-published guidebook by Kurt Brokaw with an introduction by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally, this compromise led to “a historic tour of genuine sites connected with Vlad’s name” but with the Dracula story as the backdrop.⁵⁸ This became the pattern for other Dracula tours. For instance, trips organized by Barcelona tourist operators dedicated only a few days out of fifteen to specific Dracula locations, such as Snagov Monastery near Bucharest and the Transylvanian towns of Brașov, Bran, and Sighișoara.⁵⁹ According to Kurt Brokaw, on the one hand, Romanian officials were amused by the “throngs of people” who visited the Romanian Library in New York, which exhibited portraits of Dracula, but on the other hand, they were very interested in making this a profitable business.⁶⁰ This fact alone shows the communist regime’s willingness to compromise its ideological stance if it could bring in hard currency.

Despite its high commercial nature, Kurt Brokaw’s guidebook is a guide to socialist Romania. The travel guide opens with a quite controversial presentation: “Unique travel guide to the land of the infamous Dracula … Transylvania, where people still believe in vampires and the undead!”⁶¹ Then, the introduction by two professors at Boston College (Radu and McNally) was meant to lend the guidebook credibility and authority. The guidebook starts with a chapter that tackles the historical character Vlad the Impaler, while the following five chapters describe the story of Dracula, the legendary vampire. Its tone is highly commercial with provocative remarks such as, “Would you dare spend a night in Transylvania?” The guidebook offers concrete information about how to travel to Romania: both Pan Am and TAROM had flights from New York to Bucharest, and charter flights, including accommodation, cost as low as $300 dollars.⁶² However, the guidebook reproduces several stereotypes about the Balkans and Eastern Europe in its presentation of Transylvania. The locals eat and drink a lot; they are poor but hospitable. The only place where “people move with some of the urgency and directness of Americans” is Bucharest, while the rest of the country is portrayed as “backward.”⁶³ This type of presentation would have appalled the Romanian communist regime, which wanted to portray Romania as a modern country and part of the European cultural heritage. The ambiguity of Dracula tourism in socialist Romania shows the limits of the regime’s willingness to fully adjust to the market, despite American and Western European tourists’ interest in this topic. Although these trips were advertised as “the route of Dracula,” the reference to the prince-vampire worked merely as an enticement. The Romanian tourist planners only partially adjusted to the tourists’ interest in this story and used it as a label for trips that would actually comprise destinations throughout Romania. This is what limited the success of Dracula tourism. Only ten thousand Americans visited Romania with Pan Am Tours in 1975, which was less than what the communist government and Pan Am expected.⁶⁴

Yet, in the American imagination, the Dracula story endured, and in May 1988, ABC’s Good Morning America wanted to cover, in a program titled “Haunted Europe,” Transylvania and Dracula, among four other stories that included the Paris Sewers and Catacombs, England’s Haunted Castles, and Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster.⁶⁵ As this also could be free advertising for Romanian tourism, ABC Entertainment contacted a certain Petru Sipciu from the Romanian National Tourism Office in New York in order to have the trip arranged. As they mentioned in their letter to Sipciu, it was the book of Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally that drew their attention to the Dracula story, and for more reliability, they asked to have medievalist Ștefan Andreescu and folklorist Mihai Pop, along with the long-time specialist in Dracula tours from the ONT–Carpathians, N. Păduraru, in the team that accompanied them through Transylvania.⁶⁶ Romanian authorities promptly gave their approval for the trip and helped organize it, especially since Ron Reagan, the son of then US president Ronald Reagan, was part of the production team.⁶⁷ Given that a year earlier, in 1987, two prominent West-German travel agencies, Neckermann and TUI, decided to stop sending tourists to Romania because of the tourists’ complaints and the lack of profit, the ABC show was a breath of fresh air for Romanian tourism.⁶⁸

Spain’s Road from the United States to the EEC and Eastern Europe

Like Romania, in the 1970s Spain welcomed more non-European tourists, although its focus remained on Western Europe and the United States, as tourists from these regions dominated the Spanish beaches and delivered the most income. For instance, in 1975, 83,201 Australian tourists entered Spain, 0.7 percent more than in 1974, while 599,826 tourists from Latin America checked in at Spanish hotels, 14.2 percent more than in 1974.⁶⁹ Most tourists, however, came from neighboring France (9,353,722), West Germany (4,222,022), Great Britain (3,418,720), and the United States (950,994).⁷⁰

Spain achieved this impressive number of tourists through an efficient institutional network that promoted Spanish tourism abroad in addition to investments in tourism and transportation infrastructure, which, as shown in chapter 1 began in the 1950s. In 1970, after visiting Spanish tourist offices in West Germany, the Foreign Section of the Ministry of Information and Tourism recommended that tourist offices abroad stop being sheer information booths and become more involved in public relations work.⁷¹ This meant that besides counting the number of tourist brochures and flyers that were circulated or how many people stepped through their door, these offices had “to put forth analysis about the tourist market in that respective country and to schedule promotion activities and programmes fitting with the characteristics of the local market.”⁷² The officials from the Ministry of Information and Tourism asked for this change in order to support an increase in the number of tourists, which could only been achieved if new and more modern strategies of tourist promotion were adopted. As the Ministry argued, “In all honesty, we think that at a time when the Ministry relentlessly deploys all resources to promote tourism and plans to improve central coordination of activities in order for the tourist growth to not to come to a halt, it is necessary to break with the old ways of doing things and to embrace new and more adequate strategies.”⁷³

These strategies involved putting together reports that monitored tourist movement in each country where a tourist office was located (including where tourists went, how many tourists spent vacations abroad, etc.), the way in which other tourist countries promoted themselves, as well as if there were specific groups or individuals who for political, religious, or economic reasons tried to create a negative image of Spain in that country.⁷⁴ Furthermore, these studies were supposed to follow what potential tourists thought about “historical, religious, political, and moral aspects in Spain, which would positively or negatively influence their decision to travel to Spain.”⁷⁵ The interest in tourists’ opinions about Spain was a novelty in this country’s strategy to lure visitors to Spanish beaches. This suggests the awareness of Spanish tourist promoters that some tourists might not approve of Franco’s regime or of the strong influence of the Catholic Church and that Spain should treat its tourists with more openness. Although this was a theme behind Spain’s promotional campaign in the 1960s, with its slogan “Spain is Different,” Franco’s regime hardly admitted that there was a clash between its deep-rooted Christian values that fostered a traditional society and the beachgoers in, for instance, Costa del Sol or the Canary Islands, two otherwise remote places before the arrival of tourists.

The 1970 report by the Foreign Section of the Ministry of Information and Tourism also called for the tourist offices abroad to become hubs of interaction between the Spanish state and the tourist operators and institutions in their respective countries or region. Tourist offices were supposed to have a clear agenda with regard to the specific travel agencies and transportation operators as well as other agencies responsible for tourism, as well as to the participation in exhibitions, local fairs, and events where Spain could be promoted. Advertising campaigns were also planned in those regions’ cultural centers, universities, and recreation clubs.⁷⁶ This plan was expected to revolutionize the role of tourist offices in Spain’s promotion and to open the way for cultural diplomacy through tourism. The novelty lay in the attempt to reach out to potential tourists by understanding their cultural sensibilities.

As most tourists who arrived in Spain were brought with the aid of foreign tour operators, in March 1972 a special committee for the commercialization of tourism was put together. The committee was supposed to define how the Ministry of Information and Tourism collaborated with the National Industry Institute, in particular with the Direction of Services and Aeronautics. It was also tasked with studying how tourist offices abroad contributed to the commercialization of tourism in their respective countries. By commercialization of tourism, the Ministry of Information and Tourism meant how Spain was sold abroad as a tourist destination, the practical ways in which circulation of tourists toward Spain could be improved, and how Spanish companies could be more involved. West German tourists, for instance, arrived in Spain via German air carriers and travel companies, and Vázquez de Castro, the tourist attaché in Bonn, assessed that it was difficult for Spanish air companies to enter the West German market. The only solution he saw was to offer comprehensive tourist packages to smaller tour operators, which would jump at the opportunity to enter the West German market. As the market was dominated by Neckermann, Touropa, and Scharnow, this seemed like a win-win strategy for both the smaller operators, which could receive a boost by taking this offer, and for Spain, which would be able to enter West Germany’s air and tourist market.⁷⁷ But West Germany was an exception among West European markets. The head of the Spanish tourist office in London, Vásquez de Prada, was less optimistic than his colleague in West Germany about Spain’s chances to infiltrate the British tour operators’ market. “I estimate that for the moment, Spain cannot intervene in the British market and sell tourist packages.”⁷⁸

This discussion reflected Spain’s more aggressive policy in the 1970s, when the government wanted not just to welcome the tourists but also to have a say in the tourist industry at the European and global levels. The policy tried to make it possible for Spanish travel firms to operate on an equal footing with the largest tour operators in Europe and the United States, although their chances were quite limited as travel agencies with a longstanding tradition dominated these markets. One solution that Spanish tourist specialists pinpointed was to work with smaller agencies, but that could work against them because these travel operators only had access to smaller portions of the market in a given country. Another possibility was expanding to other European regions or the Global South. In 1965, 69.5 percent of the tourists who visited Spain came from the countries of the European Economic Community (EEC).⁷⁹ In 1972, this had dropped to 64.8 percent of the tourists, and a mere 5 percent came from the United States and Canada. The remaining 30 percent came from Japan, South America, and, surprisingly enough, socialist Eastern Europe. In 1974, Joan Cals Güell, a historian of Spanish tourism, predicted that the makeup of Spanish tourism would not change much in the 1970s and 1980s. However, he also noticed that there might be potential change in the number of tourists coming from socialist countries, so this was a market that Spanish officials should pay attention to as well, despite ideological differences.⁸⁰

However, the path to increasing tourism from socialist countries to Spain was a thorny one. In January 1967, the Spanish Ministry of Tourism received requests from two travel agencies in Yugoslavia, Putnik and Kompas, to be allowed to organize trips to Spain. They inquired about the possibility of allowing Yugoslav tourists to visit Spain’s main cities. A couple of months later, in August 1967, Čedok, the Czechoslovakian state travel agency, sought permission to allow Czechoslovakian tourists to visit the Balearic Islands.⁸¹ To facilitate the process, five representatives of the two Yugoslav tourist agencies expressed their interest in visiting Spain so as to reach an agreement with the Ministry of Tourism. Similarly, V. Holecek, the Czechoslovak consul in Madrid, addressed a letter to José López de Letona, the Spanish general director for the promotion of tourism, that stated: “I have the honor to communicate to you that the Čedok travel agency from Prague, in order to meet the request of the Czechoslovak public, studies the possibility to organize tourist trips to Spain. The place that most interests us is the Balearic Islands.”⁸² However, one serious problem threatened to hinder these initiatives. Francoist Spain had no diplomatic relationships with either Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, both situated on the other side of the Iron Curtain.⁸³ Therefore, there were no clear regulations for how the citizens of these countries could travel to Spain. The first practical impediment was the lack of a local office to issue visas for possible tourists. Yugoslav tourists had to go to Milan, and tourists from Czechoslovakia had to visit Vienna, in order to get a visa.

The lack of a Spanish consulate in these two socialist countries was not the only hurdle. The Spanish Embassy in Milan was baffled by the Yugoslav travel agencies’ requests. As a result, it did not answer them in a timely manner, and it ultimately denied visas to the five Yugoslav tourist officials who planned to visit Spain to set up a tourist agreement.⁸⁴ This, however, triggered a reaction from the Ministry of Tourism in Spain, which had a different opinion on this matter than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior. Antonio Garcia Rodriguez Acosta, Fraga’s deputy, wrote to Luis Rodríguez de Miguel of the Ministry of the Interior, asking for an official position on the visa denial for the five Yugoslav officials. He attached to his request the letter from Ramón Sedó Gómez of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who, with no explanation, stated that “after consultations with the Minister, we decided that visas for tourists coming from Eastern Europe cannot be granted.”⁸⁵ Given the importance of international tourism for Spain and Fraga’s popularity, the Ministry of the Interior reversed its position and agreed that collective trips could be allowed after careful verifications. As a result of the dispute, Ramón Sedó Gómez proposed that on the issue of visas for tourists from socialist countries, an agreement among the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of Tourism had to be reached. He informed Rodriguez Acosta of the Ministry of Tourism that the criteria for granting visas to individuals from socialist countries would be simplified and access would be denied only in exceptional cases that involved the security of the state.⁸⁶ As the rest of capitalist Western Europe became more welcoming to tourists from Eastern Europe, Spain’s fear that its external image would suffer outweighed the government’s suspicion toward the Yugoslavs. Ultimately, in another letter to Rodriguez Acosta, Ramón Sedó acknowledged that “this [the denial of visas to the five Yugoslav officials] can be detrimental to our international situation and can suggest that we are hindering the exchange of tourists among the European countries.”⁸⁷

Despite this progress, the Czechoslovaks’ request to visit the Balearic Islands a couple of months later was unsuccessful. Although the Czechoslovaks obtained a visa for Spain after long negotiations, they could not visit Mallorca, their destination. An article published in the Spanish daily El País noted how a group of Czechoslovak tourists left Spain without visiting Mallorca (the main island in the Balearic Islands) because the Spanish refused to grant a visa for that particular tourist destination. The article pointed out the difficulties that Czechoslovaks faced in order to obtain a visa for Spain: “For them, it is very difficult to visit Spain as the process of getting a visa is slow and complicated; in order to get a visa, one needs an invitation from a Spaniard who also has to take responsibility for that respective Czechoslovak visitor.”⁸⁸ Overall, this visa situation threatened to undermine Spanish tourism from Eastern Europe, which was, in theory, open to every visitor regardless of political orientation. While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarded tourists from socialist countries with suspicion, the Ministry of Tourism pushed for a more flexible attitude. In the end, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs both made some concessions, but the process of obtaining a visa remained slow until the early 1970s.

Whereas the Spanish state failed to recognize the benefits of international tourism with socialist countries, the private sector had a different view. In 1968, Viajes Montesol, a tourist agency in Barcelona, asked for official permission to initiate tourist exchanges with Yugoslavia. Yet the request came after the travel agency had already established commercial relations with the Yugoslav travel agency and had sent tourists “of various nations” to Yugoslavia.⁸⁹ The agency sought legal permission because it wanted to send Spanish tourists to Yugoslavia as well. But for this to happen, the travel agency had to secure exit visas for Spaniards who wished to travel to socialist countries.⁹⁰ Although it required considerable persistence, the insistence of private tourist agencies on relations with socialist countries delivered some results. In 1970, a direct flight was established between Warsaw and Madrid as well as between Prague and Madrid.⁹¹ The airline connection reflected the improvement of Spain’s relations with Eastern Europe and the increased demand for travel between these two regions. However, it was the socialist countries, not Spain, that initiated such relations. This suggests a much more pragmatic approach by socialist Eastern Europe, which did not exclude economic and tourist relations on ideological basis. Moreover, by establishing these relationships, some Eastern European countries attempted to go beyond the artificial divisions imposed by the Cold War and to get around Soviet supremacy in Eastern Europe. By contrast, Spain’s policies in regard to Eastern Europe appeared to have been much more ingrained in the Cold War discourse until the late 1960s, while change occurred mostly in the 1970s.

Almost at the same time that Yugoslavian officials and Czechoslovakian tourists faced difficulties in getting visas for Spain, Nicolae Bozdog, the chief of Romania’s ONT–Carpathians, approached the newly appointed Spanish Consul in Bucharest with the request for a diplomatic visit to Spain. Although Spain’s tourist relationships with other socialist countries were problematic, Romania was in a better position, as it had established diplomatic relations with Spain in January 1967.⁹² The fact that in 1967 Romania was the first communist state to recognize West Germany improved the country’s image in the West and created the basis for a partnership with the so-called capitalist bloc. As Spain itself aimed to become part of the “West,” it may have regarded Romania as not fully integrated into the socialist bloc, and therefore a possible partner in tourism. Despite this connection, the organizing of Bozdog’s trip did not go smoothly because of Spain’s restrictive visa policy toward socialist countries and its overall lack of information about Romania.⁹³ Moreover, when tourist officials from the two countries started to plan Bozdog’s visit, it was still unclear how this might facilitate the negotiations and tourist exchanges between Spain and Romania.

The initiative for a meeting between the Romanian and Spanish Ministries of Tourism came from the Romanian side in the fall of 1967. Nicolae Bozdog expressed his wish to visit Spain in a meeting with Ricardo Gimenez-Arnau, the Spanish consul in Bucharest. During the meeting, Bozdog stated his desire to visit Spain as a way “to get acquainted with the Spanish experience in developing and promoting tourism.”⁹⁴ Gimenez-Arnau discussed this request with officials from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The officials suggested that instead of making an invitation at the state level, it was better to send personal invitations to members of the delegation. This proposal suggests that continued diplomatic ambiguity in the relationship between the two countries remained an important issue to overcome. Yet despite the more personal character of the visit, Gimenez-Arnau, the Spanish consul in Bucharest, and Alexandru Petrescu, the Romanian consul in Madrid, started to organize the meeting. Bozdog’s visit was to take place on April 15–23, 1968, and the two consuls scheduled activities “for an eight-day visit in order to allow the Romanian delegation to familiarize itself with Spanish tourism.”⁹⁵

The Romanians were interested in both the economic and social developments of tourism in Spain. Hence, the Spanish contingent agreed to provide informational materials about social tourism, tourist workers’ professional training, tourist propaganda, and the politics of tourism. There were also discussions of more concrete and technical issues. For example, according to Comecon internal agreements, all socialist countries were supposed to purchase the Hungarian-produced Ikarus buses. Nonetheless, Romania wanted to buy tourist buses from Spain.⁹⁶ Romanian delegates also asked to visit a number of resorts in Spain and showed a particular interest in accommodation, dining, and entertainment facilities as well as Spain’s hotel schools. They also wanted to meet with representatives of the Hotel Workers Trade Union in Madrid. In short, the Romanian delegation wanted to conduct a very thorough investigation of tourism and tourist facilities in Spain.

After observing that Romania’s tourist facilities had developed at an impressive pace from 1960 to 1968, Spanish tourist officials were also very curious about Romanian tourism. Gimenez-Arnau appreciated that the upcoming meeting was going to be economically advantageous for both countries. He noted that Romania had “A still unexploited tourist potential which could become very important within the Romanian economy.”⁹⁷

Finally, in April 1968, after prolonged negotiations, the Romanian delegation led by Nicolae Bozdog visited Francoist Spain to get acquainted with the tourist industry there and meet with Manuel Fraga, the Spanish minister of tourism. The nineteen members of the Romanian delegation arrived in Madrid on April 15, 1968. The Romanian delegation’s schedule included official meetings; visits to different hotels, paradores, and factories; and more entertaining activities that more or less turned Romanian officials into tourists. On the first day of their visit, the Romanian delegation had meetings with various officials in the Ministry of Tourism, such as the directors of tourism advertising and planning, national tourist routes, and social tourism. After these official meetings, the Romanian delegation went to the School for Hotel Workers in Alcala de Henares to familiarize themselves with the training of tourist personnel. In the afternoon, they visited the Pegaso tourist bus factory, which was on their list of priorities. The second day was less hectic, with a work session at the Directorate for Tourist Enterprises in the morning and a visit to the Escorial Monastery in the afternoon. The third day included a meeting at the School for Tourism and a dinner at a highly rated restaurant in Madrid. During the next three days, the Romanian delegation traveled south to Málaga and Granada to visit the newly developed tourist region Costa del Sol. In Málaga, they stopped at the National Golf Course and the San Nicholas Hotel School.⁹⁸ In Granada they visited the Center for National Tourism. The Romanian delegation also wanted to visit the Balearic Islands, but the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs had yet to issue them the essential visas for this visit.

Only on the last day of their stay did the Romanians meet Manuel Fraga, the Spanish minister of tourism, as he was in the United States when the Romanian delegation arrived. Spanish newspapers highlighted the visit, and photos of Fraga and the delegates appeared on the front page of El País, one of the major daily newspapers in Spain. In a statement delivered to Cifra, the news press agency, Bozdog said: “This was our first contact with Spain, and one of the first actions we need to take is to establish a direct airline connection between Bucharest and Madrid. However, this falls in our country under the responsibility of the Ministry of Transportation, and once we get back to Bucharest, we will analyze the situation and come up with adequate solutions.”⁹⁹

Both sides seemed pleased with the visit. The Spanish consul in Bucharest met Bozdog at the airport so as to get a first impression of him. Bozdog praised the Spaniards’ standard of living and his overall experience in Spain. During his visit, he extended an invitation to Fraga to come on an official visit to Romania in the fall 1968 or early 1969. The Spanish side, too, appreciated the importance and benefits of the Romanians’ visit. Moreover, the Spanish authorities congratulated the Pegaso factory’s staff for the way they greeted the Romanian delegation. Given that the Romanian delegation was interested in purchasing omnibuses from Spain, the visit to this factory was advantageous to both the Romanian and Spanish sides. In response, a few weeks after the meeting, Fraga wrote a letter to Bozdog thanking him for his complimentary words about Spanish tourism. The Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs concluded that because of Spain’s developing relationship with Romania, it should benefit from a different visa regime than other socialist countries.¹⁰⁰

For their part, Romanian tourist officials were eager to learn from the Spanish experience and to intensify tourist exchanges between Spain and Romania.¹⁰¹ A meeting of the Political Bureau of the PCR in 1968 emphasized that the policy of socialist Romania was to establish relationships with all states; therefore, cultural and tourist relationships with Spain were part of this program.¹⁰² The seriousness of that policy was soon made clear. For example, in 1968, a Spanish week was organized in Bucharest, and an agreement was set up between the Romanian and Spanish TV networks. Although the visit did not shed a significant amount of light on practical ways in which the two countries could establish a tourist relationship, it paved the way for further collaboration between Spain and Romania. If, before Bozdog’s visit, the Spanish side had tried to make sense of the available information about Romania, after the meeting, Spain was keen to develop a tourist collaboration with socialist Romania.

While in the aftermath of this visit the number of Romanian tourists to Spain did not significantly increase because Romania had strict policies regarding travel to capitalist countries, Spanish tourists did become more interested in touring Romania. In the early 1970s, Romania opened a tourist office in Madrid and put together several programs to attract tourists. In 1975, 13,600 tourists bought vacations in Romania (the initial goal was 15,600 visitors).¹⁰³ Because it wanted to boost sales of package tours, the Ministry of Tourism, together with the Romanian Embassy in Madrid, proposed a number of measures to meet their target. The proposed program included the renewal of partnerships between traditional partners such as Valencia Travel, Espatur, and Ibermundo and the signing of contracts with new travel agencies like Vagons Lits Cook, Viajes Ortega, and Sol Flash, which were also some of the largest tour operators in Spain.¹⁰⁴ It also covered a new tour suggestively titled “Jules Verne,” which highlighted folklore, common Latin roots, and rheumatic treatments with Boicil, which was popular among Spanish tourists.¹⁰⁵ In addition, Romania wanted to participate with a booth at Feria del Campo, which in 1975 celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. Feria del Campo began in 1950 as a highly propagandistic event that put the Spanish countryside on display and was connected with the Francoist ambition to emphasize the Spanish folk culture and way of life. Each region in Spain would bring samples of their best dishes, foodstuffs, and livestock and visitors were welcomed by staff dressed in traditional outfits.¹⁰⁶ Later on, the festival became international and included, among other participants, the United States, West European countries, and Latin American nations, but also, in the 1970s, socialist countries. In 1975, socialist Romania regarded its participation in Feria del Campo an important way to exhibit traditional Romanian cuisine and folk music in order to attract more Spanish tourists as well as visitors of other nationalities who strolled the exhibition.

Despite its ideological connection with Francoism, Feria del Campo became attractive to Romanian officials because of its promise to increase the visibility of Romanian tourism. In January 1975, in his letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest, the Romanian ambassador to Madrid, Alexandru Petrescu, stressed that Feria del Campo would receive at least 3.5 million visitors as an argument in his plea for Romanian participation in the festival.¹⁰⁷ And indeed, in May 1975, a group of four instrumental players led by the famous fiddle player Romeo Bazarca, along with a vocal singer, four dancers, and a Romanian chef, left for Spain.¹⁰⁸ Besides their participation in the Feria del Campo, where they played from the last week of May until early June, they had concerts in Tarragona, Valencia, Barcelona, and Málaga. In Tarragona, Bazarca and his fellow musicians played at a resort quite suggestively called Miami Playa, while in Valencia they performed at a private event organized by a certain Mr. Pasquale, the owner of Valencia Travel, a tourist agency with longstanding relations with the ONT–Carpathians.¹⁰⁹ The concert at Mr. Pasquale’s ranch was attended by prominent journalists and “opinion creators,” who afterward wrote about the concert and Romania as a tourist destination. Romanian officials’ strategy in Spain was not only to lure Spanish tourists but also to attract the foreign tourists who visited Spain. This tactic was more prevalent in Andalusia and Costa del Sol, which, although less economically developed than the north of Spain, had a higher number of foreign visitors roaming its sandy beaches.¹¹⁰ In its effort to attract more tourists with hard currencies, Romania came to regard Spain as an important tourist market despite the Francoist regime and right-wing political orientation. Against the backdrop of East–West détente, which peaked with the signing of the Helsinki Agreement in 1975, the ideological and political differences between the two countries seemed to have eased and to matter less than more pragmatic economic considerations.

In its turn, Spain hoped to expand its tourist influence in Eastern Europe. In 1975, the creation of the World Tourism Organization (WTO), an intragovernmental organization within the United Nations Development Programme, offered Spain this possibility.¹¹¹ As proof of its success with tourism, Spain wanted to play a leading role in this organization and lobbied to have both the meeting that established the organization and its headquarters in Madrid. As Mexico was rooting for the same thing, a competition between the two countries emerged, and socialist countries became important because their votes mattered. Against this backdrop, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the Romanian Ambassador to Madrid to support Spain’s candidacy.¹¹² As a token of trust, Benito Maestre, a director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, informed Alexandru Petrescu, the Romanian ambassador, that the statute of WTO had been approved by fifty-one countries from approximately seventy member states and that only the United States and Great Britain still needed to ratify the organization’s bylaws.¹¹³ Maestre used the European argument to convince Romania to support the Spanish request because, he said, if Mexico won, the European countries’ influence would be diminished. Spain was closely following the progress of the creation of the WTO, and it needed Romania’s support to meet its goal of both having a say in the organization and of keeping WTO a European affair.

Spain’s move within a decade from staunch anticommunism to an attitude of collaboration with socialist countries reflected not only the Cold War détente but also a process of Europeanization that both Spain and Romania underwent throughout the 1960s and 1970s, despite their opposing political regimes. In this process, it was tourist technocrats but also diplomats who pushed for more pragmatic solutions to turn international tourism into a lucrative activity. Although much of the existing literature has argued that the PCR’s Central Committee made the majority of the decisions, the contribution of technocrats and second-tier officials to the process of expanding international tourism mirrored the complexities of the Romanian communist regime in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s.¹¹⁴

Limits of Growth: Systemic Challenges

In 1977, an assessment of the tourism sector by the Political Bureau of the PCR noted the outstanding increase in international tourism in the first half of the 1970s.¹¹⁵ Between 1971 and 1975, international tourism brought an income of 3.512 million lei valuta compared to only 1.313 million lei valuta between 1965 and 1970.¹¹⁶ The greatest increase in tourists came from capitalist countries (thanks to the devize libere system), with an average growth of 28 percent, while the average growth rate was 11 percent.¹¹⁷ The increase in tourism from the capitalist West in the 1960s and the first part of the 1970s was nevertheless short-lived. Tourist growth leveled off in the 1970s and then plummeted in the early 1980s. In 1976, the number of tourists to the seaside was still on the rise, but that was mostly due to an increase in Romanian tourists.¹¹⁸ That same year the number of foreign tourists decreased by 25 percent and the number of tourists from Western countries by 27 percent.¹¹⁹ The ONT–Carpathians’ report to the Central Committee of the PCR cited a number of reasons for this decrease. The poor quality of tourist services in the previous year, the lack of entertainment facilities, the limited impact of advertising, and the failure to accommodate all Romanian and East European tourists on the Black Sea Coast were among the most important factors that turned 1976 into a disappointing year for Romanian tourism.¹²⁰

It was the low performance of international tourism in 1976 that most likely triggered the evaluation of the tourism sector by the Political Bureau of the PCR in 1977. However, according to this document, the culprit was the poor management of resources, the meager tourist services, and the wrongdoings of tourist managers and employees, who were accused of petty theft and even embezzlement.¹²¹ The party elite faulted economic experts and tourist technocrats for not meeting the five-year plan investment targets. For instance, in 1971–1975, 93.1 percent of allocated funds were spent, while only 84.9 percent of fixed assets were used.¹²² This had to do with the way the plan was devised in the first place (each year, the planners intended to build too many new hotels or restaurants, while much remained unfinished from previous years), but was also due to lack of interest in securing necessary approvals on time and poor execution of projects.¹²³ In other words, according to the central government, the problem was not with the planned economy but with the way the five-year plan was put into practice. However, the party elite’s attempt to blame the technocrats and tourism practitioners was not entirely convincing.

Besides these unquestionably valid reasons, there were other factors that determined the low performance of Romanian tourism. Some were related to domestic policies, while others were tied to global developments. The central government’s decision-making process was undoubtedly part of the explanation. Although initially the central power included local authorities in the decision-making process regarding tourism, later the tendency was to ignore local officials. For instance, the 1966 ONT–Carpathians’ plan failed to meet the request of local authorities to include 254 million lei in the plan’s budget to cover their expenses for tourist infrastructure and services.¹²⁴ In time, the partial exclusion of local authorities served as a brake on the coherent development of tourism in socialist Romania. The declining quality of tourism management was also a factor. In the late 1960s, the more consumer-oriented Nicolae Bozdog was appointed as chief of the ONT–Carpathians. He sought connections with the West and initiated the building of modern resorts in the southern part of the Black Sea Coast. In addition, most ONT–Carpathians employees were selected on a competitive basis contingent on how many foreign languages they spoke and their training in tourism rather than on their political associations. As the portion of party members within ONT–Carpathians hovered around 20 percent, this became one of the Central Committee’s main complaints. As a result, in 1969 a major reorganization occurred within ONT–Carpathians. A rift in the management offered Nicolae Ceaușescu and the PCR the opportunity to replace some inconvenient board members with more politically obedient functionaries.¹²⁵

The international context also played its part in the decline of international tourism in the mid-1970s. The 1973 oil crisis severely hit Western European countries, and the number of tourists declined everywhere in Europe. In fact, Romania and Bulgaria were the only countries where the total number of tourists did not decline, but this was because tourists from socialist countries replaced Western tourists. Recovery from the economic impact of the oil crisis was slow. If Romanian tourist officials considered 1976 bad for tourism, 1977 proved even worse. An earthquake in March 1977 frightened foreign tourists, who canceled their holiday plans in Romania that year. Although 1978 and 1979 saw an increase in tourists, the second oil crisis of 1979 and the subsequent economic crisis in Western Europe and the United States brought another setback. The effect was so damaging that, in the first months of 1981, Romania obtained only 50 percent of the amount in hard currencies it obtained in the first months of 1980.¹²⁶ Romanian officials made several attempts to curb the decline in the number of tourists and revenues.

In March 1981, Emil Drăgănescu, the minister of tourism, had a meeting with the minister-president of Bavaria to increase the visibility of Romanian tourism. West Germans accounted for 30 percent of the tourists from capitalist countries visiting Romania; the Romanian state anticipated receiving $29.9 million USD from West German tourists alone.¹²⁷ Nevertheless, West German arrivals in Romania did not look promising for the summer of 1981, as the number of vacation packages that these tourists had purchased plummeted by 29 percent in comparison with the previous year.¹²⁸ Drăgănescu’s visit had only limited success. Although the Bavarian minister-president promised to help organize a Romanian Week in Munich, the results were still below the Romanian officials’ expectations, largely because of their unrealistic planning but also due to an underestimation of the extent of the economic crisis in Western Europe.

Put simply, the Romanians lost sight of the economic situation in Western European countries when putting forth plans for 1981. The onset of the global recession hit West European economies hard. The devaluation of both the Deutsche Mark and the French franc versus the US dollar, which Romania used as a standard to set the prices of tourist services, significantly increased the cost of vacation packages for European tourists.¹²⁹ The effect was an increase in tourist of 40 percent for tourists from West Germany and France. This was even more hazardous for Romanian tourism as these visitors accounted for 80 percent of the tourists vacationing on the Romanian Black Sea Coast.¹³⁰ Moreover, Romania became slightly more expensive than Yugoslavia and Spain. While a fifteen-day holiday package to Romania that included lodging, meals, and transportation sold on the French market cost $484, in Spain the same vacation cost French tourists $467 if they chose organized group tourism.¹³¹

Strikingly, tourist experts warned against this tendency since the mid-1970s.¹³² In 1976, a study by the National Institute for Research and Development in Tourism noted that Romania’s lack of competitiveness led to little success in the Austrian tourist market. “Our tourist package’s selling price on the Austrian market has become higher than that of our neighboring countries and of most tourist countries in southern Europe. We recommend that prices remain the same for next year given the Austrian tourists’ sensibilities with regard to costs and our plunge on this market in the past years.”¹³³ The study emphasized that a weekend getaway in Bucharest had become more expensive for Austrian tourists than one to Sofia or Warsaw and was comparable in price to London, Rome, or Dresden.¹³⁴ In order to cut costs, the institute suggested dropping the mandatory ethnic night and city tour from the tourist package, which tourists did not seem to enjoy much.¹³⁵

The combination of an increase in prices and inadequate services turned dreadful for Romanian tourism in the early 1980s. In 1981, the number of days a tourist spent on the Black Sea Coast was 26 percent lower than it was in 1980.¹³⁶ By 1983, the crisis was already endemic. Only one new tourist objective was planned for that year, while the rest of the investments were directed to complete thirteen projects, which had begun in 1975 or 1976 but were not yet finished.¹³⁷ A dozen other projects were postponed, including the rehabilitation of Siutghiol Lake in Mamaia.¹³⁸ By the end of the 1980s, the investments stalled just when the modern tourist infrastructure of the 1960s was becoming obsolete. The reasons for halting investments in tourism are still a subject of debate, ranging from the regime’s fear that foreigners negatively influenced Romanians to the assumption that international tourism was no longer a profitable business for the communist state.¹³⁹ Nevertheless, none of these arguments fully explain the decline of investments in Romanian tourism. The decision to not sustain investment in tourist infrastructure was part of a general trend of cutting investments to save as much hard currency as possible and hence limit and pay back foreign borrowing, which became the backbone of Romania’s financial policy in the early 1980s. For socialist officials, international tourism remained of interest throughout the 1980s, and attempts to increase the number of tourists and improve services were made constantly, but with limited success. As a result, throughout the 1980s, revenues from international tourism plummeted by 45.7 percent.¹⁴⁰ Romania’s effort to welcome tourists from capitalist countries in the 1970s, which was a standard policy among other socialist countries, proved tricky because it entered an already crammed market dominated by countries with long tourist traditions. The second oil shock in 1979 and the subsequent economic crisis, along with deindustrialization in Western Europe and the United States, limited the number of tourists from other places as well. But Romania was hit harder because of its specific circumstances. As the central government’s attempts to improve tourist services met with limited success, the competition with countries (including those of the socialist bloc) that offered better tourist services and more advantageous tourist packages further hindered Romanian tourism.

If, in the Romanian case, tourist growth stopped and then spectacularly plummeted because of economic and political choices, in the Spanish case, the challenges were of a different nature. The rise in the number of tourists and revenue was continuous throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Although some groups at first regarded tourism with suspicion, international tourism became a key component of the Spanish economy once it proved helpful in fixing the feeble balance of payments in the 1950s. The appointment of Manuel Fraga as minister of tourism in 1962 opened the way for institutional and economic changes that transformed tourism into a priority of the Spanish government.¹⁴¹

A report by the Trade Union of Hotel Workers (Sindicato de Hostelería) emphasized that in 1964, the number of tourists grew by 30.5 percent compared with 1963 and exceeded the Plan of Development (Plan de Desarrollo) projections by 100 percent.¹⁴² Similarly, the revenue generated by tourism increased from $444.1 million USD in 1963 to $579.9 million in 1964.¹⁴³ Yet the report emphasizes that the increase could have been higher had the expansion of accommodation capacity kept pace with the increase in the number of tourists. But it did not, and a $50 million deficit in revenues occurred as a result.¹⁴⁴ By the mid-1960s, Spanish tourism found itself in the privileged position of becoming profitable, even though the state invested little money in developing tourist infrastructure, such as hotels.

Yet as a report put together in 1966 by the Ministry of Information and Tourism noted, tourism in Spain was far from flawless.¹⁴⁵ According to the document, the signaled problems ranged from relatively easy-to-fix ones like the lack of necessary infrastructure in the port areas compared to Italy (Spain’s main tourism competitor in the Mediterranean); the lack of road signage; complex border crossing procedures; traffic jams; and the lack of beach cleaning, to more costly and complex ones like the difficulty of building of new airports; uncompetitive hotel construction (Italy planned for 200,000 more bed places in 1965–1970), and the difficulty of coordinating several governmental bodies to develop and promote tourism.¹⁴⁶ These concerns tied into the state’s role in tourist development in Spain. The Spanish state tried to balance limiting investments and acquiring as much hard currency as possible. This stance resembled, to a certain extent, the policy of the Romanian state.

The very different roles played by the state in Spain and Romania deserve note. In the Spanish case, most of the state’s resources went into promoting tourism, developing or upgrading rail lines, improving some aspects of the road system, and investing in other infrastructure.¹⁴⁷ In the Romanian case, the state’s infrastructure investment required investment in these areas as well as in hotel and restaurant construction. Each approach came with advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the Romanian state had to sustain the financial burden of developing and managing the whole tourist system, but it could choose its priorities and which sectors to invest its resources in. On the other hand, although the Spanish state took advantage of the growth of tourism in which it scantly invested, it had little control over the actual pace of tourist infrastructure development, and it struggled to make the private sector comply with the rules, as the following discussion makes clear.

One such example was the building and preservation of a sound sanitation system in Spain. Together with other topics, such as infrastructure and tourist worker training, sanitation was on the agenda of the National Tourism Assembly in 1964. The meeting emphasized that “The sanitation issue is a problem of socio-economic infrastructure which has to do with the education, living standards and hygiene of every settlement.”¹⁴⁸ Besides the obvious issues, such as the lack of running water and a sewage system, the need to separate drinking and wastewater was a concern.¹⁴⁹ In conclusion, the meeting stated that “Every tourist village/town needs to comply with the sanitation requirements and to create a comfortable environment. Existing poor conditions have to be shrugged off, and the sanitation plans need to be fully implemented.”¹⁵⁰ Tourists also complained about the lack of minimum sanitary conditions and standards of cleanliness. A British tourist sent the following letter to Franco in 1969:

Since 1955, I have been spending my holidays in Mallorca and have been very happy in all the hotels. This year I decided to go to Ibiza, and my travel agent booked me a reservation at Hotel Nautico-Ebeso Ibiza. From the moment that I arrived, I tried to complain to the Hotel Manager, but he said he did not understand English and therefore could not converse with me. When I was leaving, I asked for the visitor’s book so that I could lodge my complaints, but the manager had given instructions to the receptionist that I was not to have access to it, and no amount of talking would induce him to let me have it. When I arrived home, I wrote on 5 August 1969 to the Spanish Tourist Office at Jermyn Street, London, and they replied that the matter was dealt with.

The following are my complaints:

The swimming pool was not usable as it contained dead fish and other rubbish and also the tiles were loose.

The bed linen was dirty and the towels were not returned to the room before 7:30 p.m. as they had been washed and were not dry. The room stunck [sic] at night and I could not sleep through this.

The food was disgusting, as salads contained dirt and slugs and the meat was always too hard to digest; dessert would consist of an unwashed banana. When we asked for ice cream, we had to pay at the table for this. On two occasions, the tea-pot contained beattles [beetles] [sic].¹⁵¹

Paradoxically, the most significant limitation of Spanish tourism came as a result of its speedy development. The hasty and at times disorderly rhythm of erecting new tourist establishments changed the landscape of many Spanish villages and towns. However, this was not always for the better. A report to the minister of tourism in 1973 emphasized that “Our coast is dotted with hotels and guesthouses, all types of constructions, not always following the architectonic patterns of the area, or the rules of aesthetics. Our seaside became a swarming of buildings that have nothing to do with the ‘idyllic image’ of our coasts and villages.”¹⁵² Moreover, despite the large number of constructions, the room capacity was still insufficient, and most lodgings did not meet sanitation requirements. So inadequate were the sanitary systems that they posed “serious risks for the health of inhabitants.”¹⁵³ Finally, the Spanish tourist planners agreed that the hasty and unaesthetic development of tourism facilities deprived Spain of its initial “mystery” and “emotion” that used to lure tourists. The report noted that a lower number of tourists would, in the long term, lead to a decline in revenues, increased unemployment of tourist workers, and ecological and cultural damage, such as the degradation of the landscape and historical heritage.¹⁵⁴ Although less dramatic than in the case of Romanian tourism, these limitations threatened to slow the rise of tourism in Spain. In response, the report called for several measures, such as studies to determine tourists’ satisfaction with the services offered, greater attention to tourism planning, the adjustment of prices in relation to quality, better coordination between tourist demand and supply, and a limitation on local authorities’ ability to issue building permits in tourist areas.¹⁵⁵

The chaotic development of tourism, along with the global oil shock in 1973, brought Spanish tourism to a halt. In 1974, for the first time, the number of foreign tourists sank, and between 1970 and 1976, the average yearly increase in the number of tourists was only 3.7 percent compared to the relatively constant 16.2 percent yearly growth rate between 1951 and 1969¹⁵⁶ The halt of growth in the number of tourists led tourist specialists to reevaluate Spanish tourism in an attempt to understand what triggered the decline. In 1976, a study by two economists, Miguel Coya and Manuel Figuerola, explained that the culprit was the low-cost tourism that Spain promoted, with prices lower than its competitors, which attracted visitors with a working-class background who were more severely hit by the crisis.¹⁵⁷ Additionally, the economists claimed that Spain did not have enough entertainment facilities due to the moral constraints of the Catholic Church, though these facilities would have brought in extra revenue despite the drop in the number of tourists.¹⁵⁸ Moreover, the Francoist regime used tourism growth, with numbers made available to the public, as proof of both the Spanish economic miracle and the success of the Francoist regime, without a back-up plan in case something unexpected happened.¹⁵⁹ These factors led to the shock of 1974, which caught both Spanish authorities and the public off guard. The decline was so startling that, in 1976, Ignacio Aguirre Moul and Juan Azcarraga of the Ministry of Information and Tourism complained to Traian Lupu and Oskar Snak of the Romanian Ministry of Tourism about the drop in the number of tourists from West Germany and the need to adjust tourist policies to the new economic reality by building fewer hotels and attempting to improve tourist services.¹⁶⁰

The oil crisis hit Spanish tourism hard in 1973, and this affected both the state and private operators. Pez Espada, one of the largest hotels in Torremolinos, had to close its doors in the late 1970s, and this was not the only example. Yet Spain managed to improve its tourist services to a larger extent than Romania did, and in the early 1980s international tourism did make a comeback. By contrast, the 1980s proved bad for Romanian tourism due to systemic, domestic, and global economic crises.

The New Order

The East–West détente of the 1970s further facilitated the circulation of tourists from the capitalist West to the socialist East. However, the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks and the subsequent economic crisis slashed tourism growth, and in the long run it affected both Romania and Spain. Nevertheless, Romania was initially shielded from the crisis. This happened due to its peripherality on the tourist market and the low proportion of tourists from capitalist countries—who were more affected by the crisis—compared to those from socialist countries. Another reason was Romania’s reliance on the planning system and low dependency on market mechanisms, which kept it afloat because state investment remained constant or even increased throughout the 1970s.

Yet, with Romania’s increasing involvement in the global economy throughout the 1970s, which mostly manifested through loans and technology transfers, the socialist state’s reliance on tourists from capitalist countries and their hard currencies grew. As a result, communist policymakers asked for an increase in prices, although the tourist experts warned against it because that would make Romania less competitive compared to neighboring Bulgaria and other tourist countries with access to the seaside. Because the higher prices were not backed by better services or enhanced promotion, the number of tourists from capitalist countries continued to decline. Despite attempts to improve tourist services, they remained below government standards, and complaints mounted in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. In 1987, large firms like Neckermann and TUI stopped sending tourists to Romania altogether because of the lack of basic commodities like water and toilet paper in hotels and the hotels’ shabby appearance.¹⁶¹ Given that in the 1970s, Neckermann alone brought about half of the West German tourists who arrived on organized tours, this withdrawal looked like a serious blow to Romanian tourism.¹⁶²

Spain also attempted to consolidate its tourist influence in Europe and worldwide. It wanted not only to become a receiver of tourists but also to have Spanish travel and transportation firms involved in the arrival of tourists. This would have allowed for more thorough economic development and avoided Spain becoming a single-product economy. The 1973 oil crisis further warned against a dependence on tourism for hard currency earnings.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War détente, Spain became more interested in establishing relations with socialist Eastern Europe. Initially, this initiative came from socialist countries themselves. For example, already in the late 1960s, but increasingly in the 1970s, Spain’s leadership in the WTO required support and an internationalization of politics that involved Eastern Europe. By having Spanish tourists spend their vacations in socialist Romania, the Francoist government also fulfilled domestic promises of prosperity. Romania and other East European countries were affordable destinations for average Spanish tourists, who all of a sudden became tourists and were regarded as Westerners and not just as Europe’s “other.” By traveling to communist Eastern Europe and Romania, Spanish tourists felt European and privileged, which up to a certain point, ironically enough, reinforced Francoism. Despite this, tourist collaboration between Romania and Spain was a good example of the internationalization of tourism, which was a topic of discussion on the agendas of the UN’s affiliated organizations, including WTO and UNESCO. In 1980, a special issue of the International Social Science Journal published by UNESCO talked about “tourism in the process of internationalization” and defined this as a “ ‘new order’ on a worldwide basis.”¹⁶³ Both Romania and Spain were active participants in this new order.

This “new order” was the work of technocratic elites in both countries. As opposed to political elites, technocrats regarded tourism more pragmatically and were more informed about global developments. They were also the ones who traveled and worked in an international environment because of their jobs, which ultimately transformed their mindset. In the Romanian context, the role of technocrats diminished in the 1980s against the backdrop of the more authoritarian and personal dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, while in Spain, the regime change that followed the death of Francisco Franco in November 1975 allowed specialists and experts to smoothly navigate through the rough waters of the economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s.