As figures for this July indicated 155,000 fewer guests staying on Croatia’s celebrated coast as compared to 2023, Minister of Tourism Tonči Glavina pointed to a new national strategy of quality tourism rather than mass numbers.
Having bounced back from the pandemic, Croatia now finds that its prime resorts, Dubrovnik and Split in particular, are swamped by visitors to their historic centres in high season. The aim now is to focus on quality tourism – and for the industry to concentrate on becoming year-round.
As Mr Glavina outlined in an interview with Croatia’s Nova TV: "We can be sure that we will have very good figures for the year, probably record numbers again. And that is our goal. We are going in a new direction, with a new law on tourism, a new strategic framework, with a whole new management model in which we are developing year-round tourism and we distribute our tourism programme”.
"In ten years, we want to be a destination that will live just as well from tourism as we do today. Today, we have to deal with management, not growth any more," he concluded.