Apartments in Split, Zadar and Makarska are being offered for just 30 euro a night, which was unimaginable last August.
This year's tourist season, despite more than a million tourists staying in Croatia daily, is not causing any celebrations among Croatian tourism professionals, reports Jutarnji List on August 17, 2018.
Although the daily number of guests according to the eVisitor monitoring system is almost the same as last year (1.015 million), people are saying that there are empty beds in all parts of the Croatian coastal areas, which shows that many tourism executives and entrepreneurs made a wrong decision ahead of the season.
Some hotels, impressed by last year's demand, when there were hardly any empty beds to be found in August, decided to increase their prices substantially and stopped the sales through travel agencies. At the same time, the expected number of tourists who travel individually has not materialised.
The official eVisitor statistics say that last Monday hotels had more than 10,000 empty beds (mostly in three-star hotels), while nearly 190,000 beds in rental apartments were also waiting for their guests. That is highly unusual for the middle of August.
“I have just received about a dozen offers from large hotel companies offering beds in August, now with 10 to 15 percent lower prices. They began to lower price in late July when it became clear that the rooms will not be sold at higher prices in August. And in spring, they sent ‘the stop booking’ order to travel agencies. Now there find themselves in problems and there are unoccupied rooms everywhere. Not too much, but they exist. This was unthinkable in August in last several years,” said a tourist agent from Scandinavia.
Problems are even greater in privately-owned accommodation units, where the record-breaking 601,256 registered beds were filled with just 414,513 guests. It is clear that the enormous growth in the number of registered beds has not been accompanied by a similar growth in the number of guests.
According to current data for the first ten days of August, only the highest-quality accommodation units can be satisfied with the results. Thus, five-star hotels do not have empty beds, just like luxury apartments and holiday homes. On the other hand, family-run three-star apartments currently have the greatest number of unoccupied beds, more than 100,000 of them. It seems that the masses of quickly-renovated former flats offered as tourist apartments are not interesting to the market in numbers which could match the increase in the number of apartments offered.
Because of this, the prices of rented apartments are falling, since owners are doing everything they can to try to find at least a few guests. In Split, Zadar, Šibenik and Makarska, apartments can be found for just 30 euro a day, which was once unimaginable for the middle of August. Obviously, in their desire for a quick profit, some have made a wrong calculation.
Translated from Jutarnji List (reported by Ružica Mikačić).
