The expansion of international hotel groups into Central and Eastern Europe after 1989: strategic couplings and local responses

This chapter combines the lens of geopolitics with the concepts of strategic coupling and path dependence to explain the inability of regional and local institutions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to facilitate adequately the expansion of international hotel groups into the CEE region in the early 1990s. It is demonstrated that although it was hoped that international hotel investors and operators would bring upgrading to the CEE hotel industry, the various responses to the expansion observed at the sub-national levels initially hampered, not fostered, the whole process.