“I always liked to tell and listen to interesting stories and travel experiences. We want to inspire others with them to go where they want to go,” says Wolf. The festival of lectures about “naked and wild Ethiopia, about the principality full of treasures of Liechtenstein” and many others attracts not only the well-known names of travelers Ladislav Zibury, Josef “Pepa” Vrtal Petr Jan Juračka, but also photographers led by Jan Šibík, mountaineers and caravanners.

The festival operates successfully thanks to income from entrance fees and from partners. Wolf hopes that the attendance of the event will be close to the record of 2019, when over two thousand people came to the lectures. They can choose from a one-day ticket worth 400 crowns or a two-day ticket for 600 crowns, while children under the age of eleven have free entry. “Attendance is difficult to estimate now, most visitors buy their tickets on the spot,” says Wolf.

The entrance fee alone would not support the largest domestic travel festival, roughly half of the income is made up of money from the event’s partners. However, securing financing is more difficult than before in times of economic downturn. “Certainly there is more caution with fire. We appreciate Loap’s more than ten years of support all the more,” adds Wolf, referring to the festival’s sole main partner. The costs of its organization are expected to exceed half a million crowns, the majority of which is a two-day rental of space in the Clarion Hotel in Vysočany.

It is Prague, as the only Czech city, that will “tighten” the festival economically. Earlier attempts to organize the event in Brno or Ostrava proved to be unsuccessful. The exception is Pilsen, where Wolf will re-organize a more modest version of the festival in January of next year together with the local cultural organization Měšťanská beseda.

He also wants to address the demand of Czechs for travel through a newly launched project of a prepaid internet database of lectures. “On the online.kolemsveta.cz website, we offer a database of about one hundred lectures that we recorded during the pandemic closures. Another four hundred or so should arrive soon,” adds Wolf.

The Dramox.cz portal shows, for example, that the online show offer model can succeed. “Theatrical Netflix” was created in 2020 and offers viewers recordings of performances for a subscription of 299 crowns per month. The majority owner of Dramox is billionaire Martin Hájek.