Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

Prague is the New (fill in the blank)

There’s a saying in the investment world that when a company shows up on the cover of a money magazine, it’s time to sell the stock. The profits are gone. Everybody knows about it and the suckers are now jumping in. In a best case scenario, the company will keep growing and you will make a modest return, but it will take years for earnings to catch up to the hype. More likely, the stock will tank and your investment is toast. Don’t believe me? Make a trip to your local library and pull out back issues of business magazines from the late 1990’s. Count how many cover stories are on Enron, Parmalat, Worldcom, Adelphia, Tyco, and less scandal-ridden companies (but bad investments) such as Hewlett-Packard, Lucent, Siemens, and Nortel.

Which brings me to Prague. As I’ve been saying for years, this city has gotten too hot for its own good from a tourist standpoint. But it is just showing up on the radar in many travel magazines and newspaper articles, like it is some exotic, mysterious city just emerging from a fog. “The New Paris,” gushes one recent article, about 15 years too late. “The new San Francisco,” said another I saw last year. Well, hotel prices are certainly starting to compete with the best of them.

This article from the International Herald Tribune (a fine paper that is like a bar of chocolate to news-starved travelers and expats) sums it up well. Titled “Growing Pains for Czech Tourism,” it talks about how visitor numbers were up 18% last year and that the numbers are expected to double over the next 5 years. Double?! You can just imagine what that does to the price of already scarce lodging in the summer, or a meal in the already overpriced tourist district.

The number of tourists may soon actually outnumber the number of locals on an annual basis. That may be normal in a sleepy beach town, but it’s a bit disconcerting when you are talking about an actual capital city–the biggest one in the country.

My advice has always been to get out of the capital after a couple of days and see a more laid-back (and cheaper) Czech Republic. There are plenty of great places that are still truly off the radar, though who knows how long that will last. The day-tripper buses are heading out in force. Go soon and spend some real time looking around.

But the beer will hopefully always be one of the world’s great bargains. Also, at least it won’t cost you much to get there. According to the article, “About a dozen low-cost carriers now fly into the Czech Republic, including EasyJet, Ryanair, Germanwings and Smart Wings, the Czech Republic’s own lost-cost carrier.”

(A tip of the keys to Erik at the fine travel blog Gadling for catching this story.)