The globalisation of the hotel industry and the variety of emerging capitalisms in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract:

While research on the globalisation of services in economic geography continues to develop in multiple directions,some service industries are still largely under-researched. The hotel industry is one of the most striking examples. Given that the hotel sector is much more global in terms of number of countries covered by each company than many other service industries, one of the crucial aspects of hotel sector globalisation that requires attention from a geographical perspective is the territorial embeddedness of expanding hotel groups in the variety of institutional, political and economic contexts. Grounded in the global production networks (GPNs) approach, this paper aims to address this lacuna in empirical and theoretical terms. Drawing from extensive research carried out in Poland, Estonia and Bulgaria, the paper examines the impact of post-communist transformations on the expansion of international hotel groups into Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and analyses how different hotel GPNs interact with the various contexts across the region. It is argued that the ways in which post-communist transformations influence the expansion of hotel groups into CEE depend upon the degree of territorial embeddedness of the hotel group, which, in turn, is reflective of the group’s business model and the architecture of its GPN. In theoretical terms, the paper illustrates how, to better account for the particularities of CEE, the GPN approach can incorporate the ‘alternative approach’ – the theory of post-communist transformations that challenges the neoliberal orthodoxy which drove the post-communist restructuring in the 1990s.