June 15, 2020 - Although tourism accounts for 20% of Croatia's GDP, it is a land of little promotion where the police answer tourist emails. It is time to abolish the Croatian National Tourist Board and start again.
I have been very critical of Croatia's tourism chiefs in recent times, and I make no apology for that. With so many people depending on tourism for their daily survival, Croatian tourism bodies need to deliver more than ever before, or more people will lose jobs, businesses will close, and more rental properties will be at the mercy of bank repossessions.
So how is the Croatian National Tourist Board doing. And WHAT exactly are they doing? As I will demonstrate below, and despite having a staff of over 70 people, the answer appears to be not very much.
I want to explore a few topics to demonstrate the lack of the need for the national tourist board, at least in its current format. I will look at four things - its promotional activities, response to tourist enquiries on COVID-19, efforts to see facts about Croatia represented accurately in the global media, and how they respond to a private tourism promotion initiative they claim to like.
Greece recently came out with a very clear statement that is was open for tourism on June 15. There was a timeline infographic, as well as a media blitz which saw Greek tourism on the front page of the BBC, featured in The Guardian, and all over the international travel media. About Croatia, there was only confusion, all the more so when Croatia opened its borders to 10 EU countries but not the others.
I was curious about how much promotion Croatia was doing internationally, so I posted some questions on my Facebook page, asking people in other countries to let me know what they were seeing, and which countries were doing the most.
There was almost no promotion whatsoever.
Curious, I sent the following media request to the national tourism board - here it is, complete with the answer:
Which are the main target markets for this season - am sure you have been forced to readjust? How many campaigns have you conducted so far, and where? What were they called?
The markets on which we are currently focused, primarily due to the epidemiological situation and their proximity, are Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland. Since the start of the pandemic, the CNTB has launched and promoted 3 campaigns. In April the new communication platform #CroatiaLongDistanceLove was created with the key message „Welcome Croatia to your home”, developed for the millions of followers on the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Subsequently we launched the campaign The Vacation You Deserve Is Closer Than You Think on neighbouring markets within a relatively short driving distance, which as mentioned include Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland. Whereas, once the necessary prerequisites are met, this campaign is also planned for the markets of Italy, France and the Netherlands. In addition, a new communication EnjoyTheViewFromCroatia was recently launched. This is an online platform, focused on user-generated content supplied by the tourism sector in Croatia, as well as individuals, namely for all those wanting to supply content and promote their destination within Croatia. This campaign primarily targets key markets, that are not likely to be traveling to Croatia in the short-term, such as the long-haul markets like the USA, China and South Korea.
For additional information you please see the accompanying press releases on http://www.htz.hr/en-GB/press/press-releases
Seven countries.
20% of our GDP dependent on those 7 countries.
I can of course understand that there is little point advertising in the USA, China or South Korea at the moment, but Switzerland, Serbia, BiH and - maybe even within Croatia itself?
Switzerland is a great market (actually the fourth biggest - yes, small numbers - on Hvar at the moment) with high-spending tourists, and yet totally ignored.
One of the people who answered my Facebook call was a Croatian living in Switzerland, who said Italy, Spain and Greece were catching the eye in terms of advertising:
1. How much advertising presence does Croatian tourism currently have in your country compared to competing countries?
To be honest, it is close to nothing. It is such a pity!
Foreign tourists spend an average of 16.5 billion in Switzerland each year, which is less than the 17.9 billion Swiss abroad.
Such a high buyer purchase, reasonable driving time and no effort from Croatia? Well, that doesn't surprise me anymore.
4. How would you rate Croatian tourism's marketing efforts in the last month out of 10?
9/10 for Zagreb's tourist board and a 2/10 for the Croatian.
Abandoning the Serbian market makes even less sense if you take politics out of the question. They are the 6th biggest daily spenders in Croatia, and they are on the doorstep, as are the Bosnians. But you can never take politics out of the equation in Croatia, especially not three weeks before a general election. So another market is abandoned.
Many people are broke due to corona, but those with money in Croatia will be looking on holiday. Has anyone seen a campaign to get locals to holiday local?
So, our hopes rest on these 7 markets. How is the promotion going?
Here is the official video of the new campaign in English - less than 10,000 views, and just 49 likes. Hardly something to base 20% of your GDP on, of course. But the campaign was based on 7 non-English speaking countries. And here the results are much more interesting.
The German version. An impressive 900,000 views.
Now look at the engagement. Just 9 likes and 2 dislikes. Have you ever come across such a popular video with such little engagement?
Similar story in Poland - almost 600,000 views, just 9 likes.
Croatia, Full of Magic for Advent last year - 1.5 million views, 41 likes.
And the most popular Croatian National Tourist Board video of all time, the heavily-promoted Croatia Feeds, with over 22 million views, and yes just 66 likes and 4 comments.
Strange, no?
I was particularly interested to meet the team answering all the emails regarding travel to Croatia. The system had been centralised, and there was now one address to contact, with many tourists complaining they were not getting replies after a week. Who was answering the emails, and why was it taking so long?
What I found amazed me. All the questions where being answered by the Croatian police!
More than 30,000 questions at time of writing. So many emails that the national police HQ had to bring in colleagues from police departments in Split, Dubrovnik and elsewhere to get through all the emails. Croatia, the land that breathes tourism, with a national tourist board, 20 regional tourist boards, 319 local tourist boards, a ministry of tourism, and a tourism section in the Chamber of Economy. And it was left to the police to reply to tourists when flights might resume to Split.
We had a good chat and I showed the ladies the TCN daily travel update in 24 languages, as well as our Viber community, which hopefully will help them a little.
In order to help a little further, I asked them to send their
10 most-asked questions, so that we could publish them in the hope that more would read and then not need to email.
It was great to meet you, ladies, and thanks for your dedication to Croatian tourism.
So with little promotion and no emails to answer, what do our brave tourist board warriors get up to all day? Do they perhaps monitor the European media for mentions of Croatian tourism and make sure that facts are reported accurately?
Hardly.
As I wrote in
Fixing Croatian Travel European Media Misinformation One Email at a Time, there has been SO much inaccurate information about travel to Croatia, unlike Greece with its clear message, that people are looking elsewhere. Inaccurate information which is easy to fix. But we are all too busy doing whatever we do to fix it. Let me give you an example from this article.
A headline in The Irish Times prompted me to write to their travel editor:
Hi Paddy,
I run the English news portal for Croatia and saw your article last night https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/irish-tourists-excluded-from-visiting-greece-and-croatia-1.4266161 which is not entirely accurate - Irish tourists CAN come to Croatia under certain conditions - and it is going to have a damaging effect on Croatia's tourism from Ireland.
It is not the journalist's fault, the info is incredibly hard to find, but as I explain in my article, many European media are printing misleading stuff. You can see the real situation in my article just published - crazy rules, but they work and there are Irish people here at the moment.
The final topic I would like to touch on is what happens when a private individual or business approaches the national tourist board with a great tourism promotion project.
I had a concept called Virtual Croatia, whereby we would bring all the digital tools for a destination into one place so that people with a desire to travel who now had the time would be able to research a destination and really get to know it. This way, they would know what they wanted to visit, have a better experience when they came, and probably spend more money.
You can see some of the articles I have done here.
I suggested that, as it was a national project, TCN and the national tourist board could do ti together as a joint promotion. I had the concept and the content, they had the money, IT, promotion and network to make it happen.
I was told that it was a fantastic idea, but that unfortunately their budgets were on hold, and there was no new money for new projects. Ok.
I decided to make a start on the project anyway and did a press release offering a free article to any local tourist board who wanted to send me their materials. I got three replies and did the three articles. All three local tourist boards were delighted and shared them on Facebook, and each article had more than 1,000 FB likes.
I contacted the national tourist board and asked them if they could send my press release to all the local tourist boards, as it was more like they would open something from the national tourist board. The reply was negative - they cannot assist private commercial businesses in that way. They did, however, send me the database of local tourist boards so that I could mailshot them directly, which I did (
and we all know how that ended up...).
Before I sent the mailshot, I contacted the national tourist board and asked if they could share some of these articles on their Facebook page, only to be congratulated on the initiative which was getting considerable traction. But no, they could not share the work of a private business.
So there we have it. Here's to the 70+ chaps at the Croatian National Tourist Board. We are pinning 20% of our GDP hopes on your brilliant campaign with no engagement. Don't let the stress of answering emails, monitoring the global media or encouraging any private initiatives got in the way of your worthy work.
