The football legends of Bayern Munch and the Croatia national team will meet in Pula Arena on July 8, as part of a spectacular program prepared by the Istria County Tourist Board, reports HRTurizam on Jun 10, 2019.

Thus, the Pula Arena will be transformed into a football field, that is, a grass futsal field, for the first time. The ground of the Arena will feature a 40x20 meter field, and tickets will be sold online and at the cashier in front of the Arena. Ticket sales should begin on June 14th.

This event is the result of the strategic partnership of Istria and FC Bayern, which was signed in June last year for three-year cooperation.

Also, before the friendly match, from June 25 to 27, there will be about 110 representatives of the management of the German first-division club, co-owners and strategic partners of Bayern.

The strategic partnership of FC Bayern Munich and Istria is the largest and most important marketing project in tourism. For Istria, it is also a strategic project in positioning the destination

The basic idea of the strategic partnership was to connect two premium brands through which identification of quality and top-class products would be created through the networking of marketing activities offline and online, e-marketing, social networks and concrete marketing campaigns in cooperation with Bayern.

In the framework of the strategic partnership, the Istria County Tourist Board has contracted 10 marketing projects in order to use the strength of the FC Bayern Munich brand and thus incorporate a part of the image and reputation of Bayern into the brand of Istria. This contract represents the biggest and most powerful advance of Istria as a destination in the marketing sense, and the effects of this partnership will have an impact on the global level, primarily thanks to the popularity of the legendary club around the world.

Bayern is one of the four richest football clubs in the world that owns 25 percent of ownership divided into equal shares among reputable companies: AUDI, ALLIANZ, ADIDAS, while the remaining 75 percent is 299,000 members who are co-owners of the club. They have 4,300 official fan clubs and over 340,000 members; over 652 million fans across the world and over 70 million followers on social networks.

The first extensive media campaign of Istria in Bavaria was held in February this year through three projects.

1st project: Dedicated photoshopping - At the beginning of the year, TZ Istria County started filming the activity of the players. Three key players were proposed, and after long and persistent lobbying, Istria got three ambassadors: Neuer, Alaba, and Martinez.

2nd project: Matchday Presenter - Matchday presenter is a big project that involved the seven-day presentation of Istria through all promotional channels four days before the match, the day after, and two days after the match.

The first part of the presentation was done during the Free Tourism Fair in Munich. With Istria and Croatia’s participation at the Fair, three major representatives of Bayern Munich came to the official stand of the Croatian Tourist Board. They were Giovanni Elber, the legend of FC Bayern Munich, Andreas Jung, marketing director and Joerg Wacker, director of the strategic development of the German football club.

The most important event within the Matchday presenter marketing project was the special presentation of Istria at the Siemens Cooking Lounge Arena where TZ Istria County organized an Istrian menu for forty invitees - mostly the owners of FC Bayern, then the strategic partners of the FCBM and several representatives of the media.

Stephan Lehmann, the official speaker of the FC Bayern who led the lottery at halftime of the games, transferred his experiences from Istria to the audience of 73,000 spectators and invited all attendees to visit the Croatian destination.

The main event at the half was a prize game involving a goal on the north side of the football field equipped with a large banner with four motifs from Istria: the views of Rovinj, Poreč, Motovun and Grožnjan. On the goal, four places were indicated to be hit to win a seven-day holiday in Istria. A special website was even created — namely, a landing page where interested parties could apply to play the game. 

Additionally, TZ Istria County broadcasted a digital banner around the perimeter of the football field in the length of 250 meters, where they cooperated with FC Bayern Munich under the name 'Istrien Urlaubtraum der Champions' with the logo of Istria and Croatia.

In the end, the entire marketing project was rounded off with a broadcast of the new promotional film for Istria, which was played across four large screens at the legendary Allianz Arena.

To read more about sport in Croatia, follow TCN’s dedicated page. 

Feature films "The White Crow" by director Ralph Fiennes about the life of the one of the greatest ballet artists of the 20th century, Rudolf Nureyev, "Tolkien" by Dome Karukovski about the early years in the life of J. R. R. Tolkien, author of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the autobiographical saga "Dolor y Gloria" by the Spanish superstar director Pedro Almodovar will be shown during the PoPular program in Pula Arena.

The 66th Pula Film Festival will see the return of the PoPular program in the week between the 15th and the 21st if July, Zlatko Vidačković, the art director of the Pula Film Festival announced at a press conference held in Pula.

The international program of the festival is mostly about biography films about the great artists of the world, and five feature and five documentaries will be shown, Vidačković said. The second part of the program will be shown in Valli Theatre: Never Look Away by an Oscar winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (inspired by the life of the artist Gerhard Richter) and All Is True by Kenneth Branagh about the last years in the life of William Shakespeare.

Great Peter Bogdanovich directed a documentary about Buster Keaton in 2018, called "The Great Buster" which will be shown in the documentary part of the program. Jean-Christophe Klotz's documentary about John Ford, Anderson's and Demmon's documentary on Montgomery Clift, Bruce Weber's documentary on Robert Mitchum will also be shown.

Director Gordana Restović announced the new festival edition "Time Machine 3". Another important book for Pula and overall history of cinematography in Croatia, written by a film archaeologist Dejan Kosanović will see its second edition.

The director of the Tourist Board of Pula, Sanja Cinkopan Korotaj took the opportunity to explain the complexity of the organization of the Pula film festival. Pula Mayor wanted to remember a not so distant past when Pula didn't have a movie theatre and compared it to the infrastructure they can be proud of today.

The state has decided to discontinue talks with the Pula hotel group Arena Hospitality Group, the former Arenaturist, about the sale of Riviera Hotel in Pula city center, reports Jutarnji List on November 26, 2018.

The Riviera Hotel in Pula is located in a beautiful old Austro-Hungarian building from early 20th century and was run for years by the largest Pula hotel company. The hotel, as it does every year, closed in mid-October, but the question is whether it will open its doors ahead of the next tourist season. For a very long time, nothing has been invested in the hotel precisely because of unresolved ownership issues, so the luxury facility is officially categorized as just a guest house.

According to Minister of State Property Goran Marić, his ministry has not managed to come to an agreement with the hotel group. “Unfortunately, we have failed to agree. The State Property Act explicitly defines how to deal with such property. Unfortunately, the Arenaturist administration has approached the process as negotiations, and the State Property Ministry is unable to negotiate. They do not understand that there can be no agreement based on business negotiations. We do not have the possibility to negotiate, and they do not understand it or do not want to understand it,” Marić said.

Therefore, his ministry has filed a request with the State Attorney's Office for the collection of all receivables that did not pass the statute of limitations for the use of the hotel and for its return to the state.

“When the State Attorney's Office solves this on behalf of the state, we will announce a public tender for sale, and they can apply,” Marić explained. He could not say when that would happen.

“I can estimate something that is not within the competence of the State Property Ministry. When the actions of the State Attorney's Office and courts will be done, the answer to this is never known in Croatia,” Marić pointed out honestly.

Apparently, the Riviera Hotel in Pula was being sold for about 30 million kuna, and the Arena Hospitality Group had big plans for it and wanted to resolve the ownership issues for a long time. The company did not want to comment on the latest turn of events.

For more on the Croatian hotels, click here.

Translated from Jutarnji List (repoted by Barbara Ban).

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