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Croatia is a successful tourist country, year after year we record increasing numbers of tourists, and more and more people see a good opportunity in renting here.
But to what extent has our tourism grown, and how productive is our tourism?
When we look at the first chart, we see that we have by far the most accommodation capacity in the EU, namely 0.28 beds per capita, twice as much as the second-ranked Iceland, and 340% more than the EU average.
Number of tourist beds per capital / EU
Tourist nights per bed / EU
When we look at the second graph, we see that the utilization of these same capacities of ours is significantly below the EU average, we are not even among the top 10 countries, but actually at the back (only five EU-27 countries have a lower utilization), and we are behind all our Mediterranean competitors.
So, we have by far the most accommodation capacity per capita in the EU, with a very low level of utilization.
Numbers like this could suggest that we have a huge room for improvement, but, unfortunately, this is not the case, room for productivity growth that's enough limited.
Namely, most of our beds are concentrated in private accommodation (over 60%), and its utilization simply cannot increase significantly. This is because private accommodation as we have on average, with tourism based on sun and sea, simply does not have the power to attract guests outside the main season and holidays, when more beds are required.
The result is the highest seasonality of tourism in the Mediterranean (and beyond), while outside the main season, most of these capacities are actually economically surplus.
Entire blocks of flats gape empty and hibernate in anticipation of annual vacations when we are flooded with more and more tourists year after year, in many places already in unbearable numbers.
And since renting, even "remote renting", is obviously profitable even with such a short season, more and more people are looking for their share of the pie in our "roommate-fry" economy dependent on seasonal labor, low interest rates, low tax burden, non-existence of taxes on real estate, the willingness of our guests to pay higher prices year after year, and good weather for two months of the year.
It will certainly work well enough for a while, but I would say that the only good weather is something that can be firmly counted on in the long term.
Author: Prof. dr. sc. Josip Mikulić
Photo: Rachel Claire / Pexels.com
