As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 14th of May, 2020, right up until the beginning of March this year, it seemed that Croatia could safely expect yet another excellent tourist season. The market for renting Croatian luxury villas with swimming pools was booming, putting everyone into a false sense of security before the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe.
The market for the renting out of Croatian luxury villas has been growing unstoppably in recent years due to better and better tourist seasons with the rolling around of each and every summer. The beginning of 2020 also promised the continuation of this positive, encouraging and directly upward trend, but with the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, everything simply came to a halt. Tportal talked about this topic with Daniel Prebeg, the owner and director of Klick and Book platform. Prebeg rents about 200 Croatian villas, and they're mostly located in Istria.
''There were so many bookings that I was expecting another record year. In the first two months of 2020 alone I made half my earnings from all of last year, and then the pandemic broke out. Over the past two months, I have received only two inquiries, and otherwise there'd usually be hundreds of them. We have a prime time for reservations after Easter and for last minutes, when we earn the most,'' Prebeg told tportal.
His clientele is mostly made up of wealthy guests from Germany and Austria, for whom it's not a problem at all to set aside anything from 500 to as much as 4000 euros per week for a stay in Croatian luxury villas in the interior of Istria or in the vicinity of Croatia's southernmost city and longstanding tourist Mecca - Dubrovnik.
Thanks to decent early bookings, all of his villas currently have reservations. Of that, about 30 percent of arrivals were postponed to later dates or to next year.
''I crossed May and June off because no one will come then. As long as the rule is in force that a German or an Austrian must spend fourteen days in self-isolation after returning from abroad, no one will bother travelling. Now we're all waiting for an official decision to open the borders back up again in Europe. If that happens, I'll fill the villas. There will be no problems then, but if July fails, we're going to have a fight on our hands for survival,'' Prebeg warned.
''In Istria, but also in Dalmatia, we could have a boom if the borders are opened. Croatia is a car destination. Many airlines have failed. It's unsafe for people to fly to Greece or Turkey, for example. And that's why we will be the first choice for many for this summer,'' Prebeg concluded optimistically.
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