April the 22nd, 2025 – The summer tourist season is rapidly approaching, and 150000 people are currently employed in the Croatian tourism sector.
As Glas Istre/The Voice of Istria/Alenka Juricic Bukarica writes, the European Union (EU) travel and tourism sector is set to continue to grow by 4.5 million new jobs by 2035, bringing the total to more than 30 million. This year alone, employment is expected to grow by almost 26 million jobs at the EU level, accounting for 12 percent of all the bloc’s jobs in the industry.
This is a projection published by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). According to it, in parallel with the growth in the number of workers needed, the contribution of travel and tourism to the EU’s GDP will also increase to almost 2.3 trillion euros. Its economic share is also expected to continue increasing to almost 11 percent over the next decade. According to these very encouraging projections, tourism should exceed the growth of the EU economy as a whole at an annual growth rate.
150,000 workers in the croatian tourism sector
Moving away from massive EU-wide figures and concentrating solely on the situation in this country, we must turn to the current data. According to information from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), back in August last year in Croatia, the number of employees in the accommodation and food service sector grew by 3.5 percent, to some 115,000 people. It is estimated that in the broader sense around 150,000 workers are employed across the Croatian tourism sector.
The contribution of tourism to employment is clearly shown by data from the past decade or so. The accommodation and food service category employed around 60,000 workers back in 2015, and by 2019, that number had grown to around 95,000 workers. During the coronavirus pandemic the number of employees in the Croatian tourism sector fell again to around seventy thousand. Since the pandemic until today, there has been clear growth, which has in the meantime been stimulated by the total abolition of quotas for foreign workers.
foreigners in the croatian tourism sector
The number of foreigners working in the Croatian tourism sector is on the up. That has also been evident from the number of work permits issued to foreigners, of which there were around 56,000 in tourism last year. Around 15,000 work permits also relate to seasonal workers employed in the Croatian tourism sector. According to some estimates, Croatia could need around half a million foreign workers in total by 2030, a good part of which also relates to the tourism sector.
Eduard Andrić, president of the Croatian Tourism and Services Union (STUH), commented on how much the need for workers in tourism will grow in the coming years. He recalled the fact that Croatia has adopted a Strategy for Sustainable Tourism Development until 2030. That strategy assumes that the coast will not be concreted. He will say that there’s still room for building hotels, but that the quality of the existing ones should be greatly improved before new construction takes place.
