This fascinating study uses a comparative lens to explore key features of leisure travel, economies, and state agency. The similarities and differences in these two cases—Romania and Spain—allow us to consider the particularities of the post-1945 world through the frame of tourism. Dictatorship provides one key similarity between the two countries, but they also have in common that each was located on the geographical and ideological periphery of their camps. Spain differed from its western European neighbors due to the dictatorship of both Catholic Church and Francisco Franco. Romania, while communist, had carved out a path of significant independence from the Soviet bloc. The difference—Spain as a capitalist, market-based economy and Romania as a planned socialist economy—provides the analytical toolkit to evaluate the power of these two systems in modern economic and social life.

The book is divided into two parts, the first examining the institutional bases of the tourism industry in each country, and the second looking at the experience of tourism as it affected hosts and guests alike. The institutional picture relies largely on government documents; the narrative occasionally sticks too closely to a literal recounting of reports and proposals, but key elements emerge. Infrastructure mattered hugely to both states, and in Spain, the state’s main role was to invest in modernizing the country’s airports, railways, roads, and utilities. Secondarily it sought to regulate the market activities of tourism providers, but otherwise the market ruled in offering accommodation to vacationers, which could lead in some cases to congestion and chaotic development. In Romania, all tourism activities were controlled by state planners, from highways to hotels to foreign currency shops. Thus, in Romania development of tourist areas could proceed rationally and efficiently, with construction dominated by large-capacity hotels. In Spain private individuals opened their homes to vacationers or invested in small-scale hotels willy-nilly, wherever tourists started looking for sand and sun. Both economies prized the income that foreign tourists generated, and they both sought to appeal to an international clientele more than to locals.

The second part of the book reveals the unintended consequences of the expansion of international tourism: hosts and guests interacted. Romanian tourism workers’ exposure to foreign visitors created an unwelcome awareness of economic inferiority but also a new sense of transnational community. Spaniards’ exposure to more liberal sexual values of northern Europeans led gradually to the erosion of the authority of the Church and eventually to a transformation of Spanish culture. Oral histories and interviews provide compelling insight into these personal interactions.

“Dictatorship” provided each state with a means to solve the fundamental dilemma of opening their borders: “how to deal with the disruption of everyday life habits while reaping the economic benefits of international tourism” (135). In Spain, the Catholic Church sought to police the behavior of tourists and locals alike. In Romania, the security police used surveillance and informants to maintain control over everyday life, including consumption patterns. In both cases, these coercive institutions were countered by the power of informality. The black market in goods and currency allowed Romanians to buy goods from tourists for their own use or for resale. Private individuals in Spain opened guesthouses without government authorization. Personal exchanges such as gift-giving in Romania also undermined the authority of the police.

Looking at change over time reveals a key difference in the trajectories of the two dictatorships. Both benefited from the growing demand for and affordability of foreign vacations by travelers from northwest Europe (and for Spain, from the United States), especially in the 1950s and 60s, as the world recovered from wartime scarcity. Pan American Airlines launched a direct flight from New York to Bucharest in 1971. The effect of tourist dollars and tourist habits led to social and economic liberalization in both countries, and ideology took a back seat to profit. Economic shocks in the 1970s, however, led to a divergence in experience. The Romanian economy struggled to attract international tourists to an economy based on rationing and penury. As a tourist destination, Romania remained on the periphery. Spain, however, weathered the disruption of the 1970s oil crisis much better than Romania did. With the death of Franco in in 1975, Spain was no longer a pariah state, but a normal one. Romania remained an exotic and underfunded other. Was this divergence due to dictatorship (and its absence) or to the adaptability of the respective economic systems?

A final and compelling case study chapter on beach tourism pulls all of these themes together, reiterating the commonalities (sun, fun, elsewhere, and license!) and the differences between the two systems.