Formation of tourism law in Slovakia and some of its divergences in relation to Czech law

Abstract

Attempts to codify the issue of tourism appeared in Slovakia and the Czech Republic almost simultaneously with attempts to formulate and follow a purposeful state policy in this area. We can trace this effort in Slovakia to the years of the Second World War, while in the Czechoslovak context it was connected to the previous pre-war period. Just as there are common starting points, the same are the decisive stimuli that led to the initiation of the process of gradual legal regulation of tourism in the 1990s. Given the initially identical legal starting points and the same social challenges and needs, the observed development reached remarkably different results in both countries, not only in terms of the quantity and complexity of legislation, but the differences are noticeable even deeper, already in the formulation of state interests and goals in this promising economic sector. The paper tries to define the entirety of tourism law, characterize its current form in Slovakia and indicate the reasons for the divergent development in both countries.