August the 27th, 2021 - Croatian passenger transport for 2021 so far is significantly stronger than that of the comparable period of pandemic-dominated 2020, by as much as 124 percent.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Jadranka Dozan writes, the restrictions imposed on travel that came with the outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic last year have left a strong mark on Croatian passenger transport activities, and in recent months this has been reflected in a significant increase when compared to 2020.

While the first quarter of this year was still very much marked by a decline in the number of passengers transported (34 percent) because in a good part of last year's first quarter there were no such restrictions in force, in the second quarter of 2021, state statisticians recorded significant annual growth.

According to the latest CBS data, a total of 13.9 million passengers were transported from April to June, which is 124 percent more than in the same period last year, although this still means that there has been a 35.8 percent decrease when compared to the same period in 2019, equal to 7.7 million fewer passengers.

Of the less than 14 million passengers transported, road line transport is expected to account for 7.9 million passengers. And that is far from the pre-pandemic figures (35 percent less), but compared to last year, it represents an increase of a very encouraging 157 percent.

At the same time, slightly less than 3.4 million passengers were transported by rail, almost twice as many as in the observed period of 2020, with a relative lag for 2019, as was the case in road transport.

The same percentage decrease compared to the year before the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 was recorded in the period April-June by Croatian shipping companies in maritime and coastal transport with close to 2.5 million passengers, which is four fifths more than last year.

The biggest gap compared to pre-pandemic achievements is, unsurprisingly, in air transport. Airlines carried 173,000 passengers in the second quarter of 2021, and although this means an increase of as much as 176 percent when compared to last year, it is also only 27.2 percent of the realisation in the same quarter of pre-pandemic 2019.

If we add up the total decline in the first and growth in the second quarter, the result of the first half of this year is 25.2 million passengers carried or 11.2 percent more people using Croatian passenger transport than last year, but 38.3 percent less than in 2019.

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