Vacationing in Dictatorships examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s.

By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating Eastern and Western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West.