View article

In the early 1990s Hungary was the world’s fifth most-visited tourist destination country, but reductions in the number of curiosity-seeking tourists, and recurring conflicts in the Balkans, affected tourism in Hungary adversely: the country ranked 12th in 2001 and 13th in 2002. Tourism has been a major sector of Hungary’s economy since the 1970s: its GDP contribution rate is significant, its role in foreign currency earnings is important and its ripple effect in creating jobs and boosting demand in many sectors of the economy is sizable. Although the late 1970s and early 1980s brought large-scale international development projects, tourism, especially the provision of accommodation and catering and travel agency services, became a very attractive target for foreign investors, particularly after 1989. Privatization boosted the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) mainly from the UK, Switzerland, France and Germany. Further, the late 1990s witnessed a new surge of interest from foreign investors that fuelled the current hotel construction boom. This chapter describes the most important tourism FDI projects implemented in the past decade, or currently in progress, in Hungary.