We are entering the very end of the peak of a very successful summer tourist season, the numbers of which reached and in certain segments and destinations even exceeded those of the record year 2019.
Comparing the figures, it is impossible not to get the impression that the tourist year 2022 is already among the most successful years of Croatian tourism. Since the beginning of the year, Croatia has been visited by more than 12 million tourists who have made around 70 million overnight stays, and our country, despite the recovery of other destinations in the Mediterranean, which were significantly more affected by the pandemic, has maintained excellent results and currently achieves 95 percent of tourist traffic compared to to the record year 2019 so far.
Can we be satisfied with the achieved results, what will the continuation of the year bring and what changes can Croatian tourism expect in the coming years, for New sheet the Minister of Tourism and Sports spoke Nikolina Brnjac.
“The tourist year 2022 has been really great so far. We are still in the midst of the summer season, where more than a million tourists stay in Croatia every day. However, I would emphasize first of all that we are satisfied with the whole year, not just the summer season. During the spring, we achieved excellent results, as many as five million tourist arrivals were achieved, which is particularly important because the very beginning of the year brought great stress, from geopolitical to the spread of a new and more contagious variant of covid-19. Despite this, in the first quarter of this year, according to CNB data, we had the highest income from foreign tourists in history when it comes to that period.
I believe that the reason for this is that we have truly proven ourselves through two pandemic years and have shown both old and new guests that we care about their safety, and at the same time that Croatia is a destination that offers numerous and varied quality contents. During the pandemic, we made good use of the favorable epidemiological situation, as well as the fact that for many Europeans we are a self-driving destination, and tourists had the opportunity to get to know Croatia where there was no mass and excessive tourism as we witnessed in 2019. We accelerated and improved many processes, especially digitization, and we also got an incentive to think about how to provide a better service,” said Brnjac.
The tourist season recorded excellent results and Croatia achieved 95 percent of tourist traffic from 2019. What is expected in the rest of the season and will we be able to beat the records?
“In the summer season of this year, we are again among the most sought-after destinations in Europe and we are one of the few destinations that has already achieved the results from the pre-pandemic 2019 period this year. If we look at it financially, this year we are achieving 33 percent better results than in 2019, and already during September we expect to exceed HRK 28 billion, which was the value of fiscalized accounts in the whole of 2019. We are additionally happy that the bookings for autumn are very good, and we expect positive trends to continue in the rest of the year. This is the kind of tourism we want, year-round, high-quality and sustainable. In the end, we should not forget that, with multi-million tourist arrivals from all over the world, tourism is a big stage on which we present everything that Croatia has and offers,” said Minister Brnjac for New sheet.
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