February the 20th, 2021 - Could tourism in the extreme Croatian south grow despite the ongoing issues with leisure travel and the lack of flights? The extreme Croatian south remains, until Peljesac bridge is completed, cut off from the rest of the country by Neum, Bosnia and Herzegovina's only coastline, and as such has always been, primarily, a flight destination.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Suzana Varosanec writes, when it comes to tourist accommodation in super-luxury villas, after almost experiencing none of the coronavirus crisis last year, the forecasts are now even better, and the Zadar agency Croatia Luxury Rent (CLR), one of the strongest players in the market with about 420 villas across the Adriatic, is predicting further growth the number of arrivals of guests with higher purchasing power.
This started happening last summer: such guests could not travel to their usual more distant destinations, so they decided to spend their summer holidays in various destinations across Istria, Kvarner and Dalmatia.
A kind of acceleration in the number of reservations is expected during the spring, and guests are still being cautious, according to the owner and director of CLR Josip Stulic, in waiting for travel conditions and border regimes to be more clearly defined, ie an improvement in the overall epidemiological situation. He believes that the best filled accommodation and holiday homes will be in the Primorje-Gorski Kotar and Istria counties, then Zadar, Sibenik-Knin County and finally Split-Dalmatia County.
"The extreme Croatian south, at least within the context of the total number of arrivals in the coming season, should gradually grow and certainly will not fail at the level of private accommodation, although it is evident that destinations like Dubrovnik have attracted guests who arrive by air for years now, and their numbers will be significantly less in the coming years.
Private accommodation, along with nautical tourism and camps, is the foundation that should be the backbone of success in the coming seasons in terms of income and the number of arrivals. Unfortunately, for some time yet, we won't be enriched all that much by the arrival of airline tourists, which will be present in the form of stagnation not only in our country but also globally, but because of that, the number of places hosting guests who drive here along our coast will grow,'' explained Stulic.
With last year's occupancy rate of 86 percent of CLR and following 2020's realisation of any domestic tourism at all, it is predicted that the tourist season for 2021 should be more successful than expected.
Croatia's great advantage as a destination is its geographical position, which, as he pointed out, should lead to good results in the future, assuming that the situation with the coronavirus will stabilise in the coming months, primarily due to the ongoing vaccination process across the globe.
"Looking at the aforementioned fact that Croatia is brilliantly positioned and extremely well connected with emitting markets within the region, it is to be expected that this information will become crucial. All of the above should happen if there are no unforeseen geopolitical events that could change it,'' stated Josip Stulic.
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