June the 1st, 2022 - We're on the very first day of June and the height of the Croatian summer tourist season is just around the corner. Split-Dalmatia County bookings are looking beyond excellent so far, with huge expectations for the summer.
As Morski writes, all tourism indicators at this moment in time show that from the beginning of the year to the end of May, we're managing to reach around 80 percent of the traffic, in terms of overnight stays, that we enjoyed back during the record, pre-pandemic year of 2019.
''If we look at 2021, we've got three times more nights than we had last year. There are absolutely excellent bookings for the peak season,'' said Josko Stella, the director of the Split-Dalmatia County Tourist Board for HTV recently.
Up north in beautiful Istria, the pre-season is traditionally good, Denis Ivosevic, director of the Tourist Board of Istria County, emphasised that even in the winter months, good work was done. Looking at the beginning of the year until yesterday, Istria realised an impressive 2.8 million overnight stays, which is 5 percent better when compared to the same period back in 2019.
When asked how much the reservations were influenced in some foreign media with reports that large numbers of jellyfish had invaded the waters around Istria, Ivosevic said that every now and then, information of the sort appears that tries to discredit the entire Adriatic coast. He says that they contacted experts from the approproate faculty who refuted the thesis that the entire Adriatic, especially the northern part of it, is full of jellyfish. He pointed out that this was something that had bothered the fishermen a little back during the winter, and someone misunderstood it and published that information falsely, but the reports have since been proven wrong and therefore we can believe that there will be a lot of Czechs and Slovaks visiting this summer.
As for guests heading much further south, Split-Dalmatia County bookings are currently accounted for in around 10 percent of domestic guests, and the ongoing increase in prices will affect these figures as we move forward, if the inflation wave doesn't stop.
When asked how much the war in Ukraine affected the clientele in Istria, Ivosevic said that tourism is a heterogeneous activity that changes from year to year.
''What we had in the previous couple of years definitely had an even more significant impact. Some new trends and criteria for choosing a destination to go to have changed. We, as the northernmost region, did very well during that pandemic-dominated period,'' he said. According to Ivosevic, it's now up to all tourism workers and stakeholders to follow all the trends unfolding across the world and being ready and prepared for new trends to which they'll need to adapt as quickly as possible.
''It's obvious that we're adapting very well because the situation is very good and promising,'' he added.
Josko Stella said that although Split-Dalmatia County bookings are promising, they've still got a master plan for further tourism development, and their main goal is sustainable tourism with the help of the local population. They have already taken some actions on that front.
For more, make sure to check out our dedicated travel section.
