With the main season now over and many of the olives harvested, there is a little more time to look over the 2016 season. The official statistics for the first nine month of 2016 have been released, and if the numbers are to be believed, it was a good season for Jelsa, which topped 400,000 over night stays for the first time in a while. In the first nine months, Jelsa region had 413,503 overnight stays, up 17% on last year’s 354,201, and the number of tourists was 51,761, up 14% from 45,510 in 2015.
A significant art of that increase can be attributed to Hotels Hvar and the Fontana Resort, the two hotels in the town, which reported not only much better numbers, but also a higher average room rate. The hotels have made a good recovery after the late cancellation of a long-standing contract with a French tour operator, which was an important component of the hote group’s tourism traffic for many years. As you can see from the numbers below, that gap has not only been filled, but 2016 is even stronger than 2014, the last year of the French.
The additional numbers have come in the form of more group tourists from Finland, Slovenia and Germany, while there has been a marked increase in individual online bookings due to increased marketing actiities.
2016 – 105,960
2015 – 95,689
2014 – 100,317
Another winter of construction awaits Jelsa, but it would seem that things are slowly starting to take shape on various fronts, and one dares to hope that the good times lie ahead once more for the destination which was named the best in all former Yugoslavia just 33 years ago.
