In this region, tourism income mostly stays close to home, he says — by his estimate, roughly seventy percent of the businesses profiting from it are locally owned, mostly small and medium-sized operations.
They genuinely need the alternative. The heavy industry the region once depended on — coal mining, above all — is fading fast, and agriculture is shrinking too.
Tourism's benefits go beyond money, in his telling: shops now carry a far wider range of products than before, and locals themselves can finally afford to take a holiday of their own.
The real obstacle is the legal system, which hasn't caught up with the new economic reality — taxation especially. Whatever profit tourism generates tends to get swallowed straight back up, either reinvested or paid out in tax, leaving little real gain so far.
They're still in the early stages of all this. Tourism is so new here that the government has little real expertise in it, and isn't confident enough to take investment risks — which only pushes more of the cost back onto entrepreneurs like him.
Even so, he believes the municipality should be treating tourism as a genuine priority, given how vital it's become to the local economy — planning and investing more deliberately, and guarding against runaway prices and the erosion of local cultural values.
For him personally, it mostly means working harder: tourists expect more than they used to. But it also cuts the other way, opening real opportunities — to develop himself, travel a little more, and rediscover his own culture along the way.
Culturally, tourism pulls in two directions at once. It's brought new attention to local traditions, even as young people dress and behave more like outsiders. He describes it as an ongoing search for balance — one with a clear limit: it's not acceptable if that imitation stretches as far as drugs and alcohol.
What bothers him more personally is how some Western visitors still see Czechs — as people from a communist country, and therefore somehow less capable. Not always treated as full people, he says plainly, and he doesn't like it.
“Many Western tourists still see us Czechs as people from a communist country — and think we're stupid because of it. They don't always treat us as full people, and I don't like that.”
What he wishes tourists understood is simple: their behaviour matters, because local youth genuinely look up to them as an example. He'd like visitors to take that seriously — especially when it comes to drugs and alcohol.