The director of the Hotel Quercus in Drvenik near Makarska, Tonči Andrijašević, wrote an article for Slobodna Dalmacija which details his review of the tourist season of 2019.
He mostly discusses the results achieved on the Makarska Riviera, which is the area where he works and knows best. He explains that there are around 35 thousand beds overall there. If we agree that all of those are filled during the 50 days of the high-season, and a guest spends around 50 euros each day overall, that means that 87,5 million euros will arrive along the Makarska Riviera during those days.
His key point is that, in order to estimate the success of a tourist season, we can't just judge by the numbers - saying that 87,5 million euros is successful and that 87 million would've been unsuccessful doesn't seem right to him. He is against numbers and counting as the critical criteria for the success of the tourist season.
His answer to the question "Was the season a success?" also depends on whether you want to work in tourism for a season, or your plans are more long-term. If one year is your goal, then this year was a success, as we managed to get as much money as possible from the tourists who came to Croatia. However, if you're in it for the long haul, then things get complicated because then the only measure of success becomes how many of our guests would recommend to their friends to come to Croatia, how many of them will return?
He continues to give several pieces of criteria (he calls them banal) which could be used to estimate how successful the tourist season of 2019 was:
1) Traffic - can the people of Makarska be satisfied with the fact that the traffic around the town was completely blocked for many days, that there are no new roads being built to help the growing traffic, and what do tourists think about an hour and a half drive around the town?
2) Parking - the city administration sees that as easy money, while tourists hate paying it, but they have to because there's no other solution for them. The parking in Makarska is more expensive than in Rome, no new parking places are being built or are planned, and there are no chargers for electric cars or fast chargers for Tesla vehicles.
3) ATM machines - there are around a hundred ATM machines installed in Makarska, with extremely unfavourable exchange rates. Can we be sure that the tourists understand that it's not our fault that they were legally scammed by those ATMs?
4) The beaches and the wastewaters - is the season successful if there was only one occasion when the wastewater ended up on the beaches? Or if the machines were destroying the beaches before most of the tourists have arrived?
5) Insulting the guests - each year, we can read in the Croatian media how the people arriving in Croatia as tourists aren't that great at all, we keep insulting our guests. People running the restaurants keep complaining about how their guests don't want to buy the expensive food they offer, they want something else - well, shouldn't they change what they're offering? Tourism is the only profession where it's normal to constantly complain about our customers.
He concludes by saying that the situation has not been all that bleak during 2019's tourist season, that there are amazing villas in which a lot of money was invested, there are some great restaurants, people who remember how things used to be when the tourism first started and understand that they're making their living from tourism, and thus living for it. We still have amazing nature, Biokovo near Makarska, and all of the possibilities. We don't have the strategy, planning, or any idea of what tourism should be in the years to come, or how to attract tourists in the year 2030.
