Industrial giants around Europe are reconsidering whether global supply chains should rely so heavily on Asia. But leaders of the small town of Český Krumlov, who watched their streets empty months before the coronavirus made land in Europe, are wondering the same thing, according to an article in SeznamZpravy.cz. As recently as last fall, it writes, crowds of tourists fed by a constant stream of buses were pulsing through the UNESCO-listed town of 13,000 which for many Chinese tourists is their second must-see destination after Prague. But what looked like a slow winter season in February became an all-out crisis once the Czech borders closed in March. Deputy mayor Martin Hák says that with March and April virtual write-offs, it’s all but certain that a number of planned celebrations, festivals and company events that had been planned in town will end up being cancelled. At the same time, he admits that things had gone too far and that some kind of change for the city was needed. “To be honest, we all knew it had gone too far,” he says, remembering last summer when the crowds made it difficult just to walk down the street. “It’s not just Krumlov’s problem but it’s also in Barcelona, Toledo, Venice or even Dubrovnik in Croatia. You have to fight your way through crowds.”
He says he expects Asian visitors to be among the last that will return to the city, once things begin returning to normal. “We definitely want to be on our domestic clientele and on our neighbors: Austria, Germany, Slovakia and Poland. People from these countries know exactly where they’re going, what they want here and they still come back often.” Chinese visitors, he says, had a tendency to show up just for a few hours, take a few pictures, visited the castle and then drove on. After Central Europeans, he says the city is counting on tourists from Russia, Ukraine, Slvenia, Italy and France.
