July the 4th, 2023 – It’s been a burning topic for local media for some time now, and as the summer gets into full swing, foreign media are now also tackling Croatian price hike woes.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, foreign media portals are talking Croatian price hike issues, and Kronen Zeitung (Germany) is just one of them.
Better than Italy say the Germans
“Istria is similar, it’s closer – but also much cheaper – than Italy. Some would even go so far as to say that Istria is even more beautiful. The beaches are cleaner, the sea is clearer, and the cities are less crowded with tourists. And from this year, visitors no longer have to change their money (from kuna to euros) because from January the 1st, the official Croatian currency is no longer kuna, but the euro.” This is how the German newspaper Kronen Zeitung writes about Croatia, adding, however, that with the introduction of the new currency, prices also increased, citing the example of butter for 4.50 euros or pizza for 18 euros, as reported by Rijeka portal Novi list.
The Austrians are also paying attention
The increase in prices affected apparently all summer holiday destinations, although not equally. Thus, the Austrians wrote before the summer season that Greece and Spain in particular had increased their prices, and to a lesser extent, Italy, Croatia and Turkey had done the same.
The German statistical office delves deeper… outside of the season
At the end of May, the German Federal Statistical Office, on the other hand, published a comparison of holiday costs in Europe, albeit for March, which means that they should be taken with a grain of salt considering that prices rise significantly in the tourist season regardless of the euro or inflation.
According to this analysis, the cheapest travel destinations at the time were Turkey and Albania, where holidays are about 56 percent cheaper than in Germany. In Portugal and Malta, it was 28 percent cheaper for German tourists to eat out or stay in a hotel.
In Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic, tourists paid 18 percent less for restaurant and hotel services in March than in Germany. Here in Croatia and in Cyprus, they paid 17 percent less. In Greece, it was even 21 percent less compared to the costs in Germany. Montenegro and Romania were even cheaper, staying in hotels and visiting restaurants cost about 46 percent less than the same activities cost in Germany. It turns out, therefore, that Turkey and Greece, Portugal, Malta, and slightly, (meaning by only one percentage point) Spain were cheaper than Croatia.
The Italians praise Croatian ferry ticket prices
On the other hand, the Italian portal Vivanoda, specialised in transport, compared the prices of ferry tickets in numerous European countries, and it turns out that ferries are the cheapest of all right here in Croatia, and despite price hike complaints, maritime travel is A-OK. To be more specific, they calculated the average price of a ticket per 100 kilometeres of travel, and Turkey turned out to be the most expensive, that is, the ferry line between Greece and Turkey.
The average ticket price for 100 kilometres in maritime travel in Turkey comes to as much as 163 euros. Croatia is the last place in this regard with the lowest price of 53.77 euros per 100 kilometres. Of Croatia’s typical competitors across the Mediterranean, Italy costs about 77.7 euros, Spain about 70 euros, and Greece about 59 euros.
