Matěj Kratochvíl: Lake Lipno's family business turned empire

Matěj Kratochvíl leads the new generation of managers at the Conduco group, which owns the Lipno Areál resort and a network of tourism services around Lake Lipno in South Bohemia. Over thirty years, his father's modest project has grown into a sprawling business that includes cable cars, hotels, restaurants, a bakery, a butcher's shop and even its own cyclist rescue service.

The company's story began in the 1990s with two friends — water-management specialist Miloš Kratochvíl (Matěj's father) and architect Martin Krupauer, founder of the well-known studio Ateliér A8000, which today is involved in the Vltava Philharmonic Hall project in Prague. Together with the then-mayor of Lipno nad Vltavou, they realised that after the decline of heavy industry and a mass exodus of residents, the region could only survive through tourism. The friends toured Europe's biggest lakes, including Italy's Lake Garda, and decided to bring a working Western development model to southern Czechia.

Unlike many Czech mountain resorts, where business is split among dozens of small owners — one runs the lift, another the ski school, a third the restaurant — the founders of Lipno Areál took a different route and brought the key services together under a single group. That is how the cable car came about, along with Czechia's first treetop walk and the largest forest playground in the Šumava region, the “Forest Kingdom.” Around this infrastructure, the group's own hotels, restaurants and other food projects gradually sprang up, including a bakery with home-style bread and a butcher's shop that uses no industrial semi-finished products or imported meat.

Matěj Kratochvíl himself earned a degree from a Dutch university and spent several years working in corporate banking, but decided to come home to combine his love of nature with modern company management. According to him, the group's strategy isn't built on tending its own “garden,” but on a comprehensive approach to the whole region: “There's no point building a luxury hotel in the middle of a desert — a tourism product that truly works only emerges when the entire destination is thriving.”

The next generation of the family is involved in growing the business too. Karolína Krupauerová, daughter of one of the founders, who studied tourism in Innsbruck, Austria, makes sure that development around Lake Lipno remains sustainable for decades to come. Matěj's brother-in-law, Vítek Bechyňský, is in charge of cycling tourism — together with the surrounding municipalities of Vyšší Brod, Loučovice and Frymburk, he helped launch the KolemKolem.info platform for planning cycling routes.

What sets this project apart is a service unique in Czechia — SOS rescue for cyclists: if a tourist breaks down or runs into trouble on the road, they get free help right on the spot, thanks to a partnership with the companies Kooperativa and Toyota Dolák. According to Kratochvíl, this service has no equivalent anywhere else in the country, and it neatly illustrates the family business's philosophy — not developing isolated spots, but an entire tourism ecosystem around Lipno.