Croatia is the only country in all of Europe, and not just the EU, which fails miserably in achieving even 1 percent of its annual tourist traffic during the winter months of January and February.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Crnjak writes on the 8th of January, 2020, despite years of efforts to extend the tourist season, either with good ideas or simply bizarre schemes, Croatia still has by far the highest seasonality of tourist traffic of all European countries, this also includes non-EU countries.
The just released Eurostat report based on overnight stays in 2018 showed that Croatia has the most pronounced seasonality curve, with as much as 59 percent of total tourist traffic realised in just two months – July and August, which is as much as fifteen percent higher than the next countries on the list – Bulgaria and neighbouring Montenegro.
Croatia is the only country in all of Europe (as a continent, not necessarily as a bloc) that fails to generate even one percent of its annual traffic in January and February, and even Greece, a destination that also has longstanding and enormous seasonality problems, is faring better than Croatia. As is well known, the problem of seasonality has an impact on tourism revenue and pricing policy, as well as on the profitability of investments in tourist facilities, infrastructure and accommodation.
The seasonality in Croatia is mostly influenced by the structure of its accommodation capacities, with by far the largest share of beds in private accommodation (as much as 37 percent of it) and only 10.2 percent of beds in hotels. At the same time, according to the Tourism Impulse publication of the Croatian Tourism Association, the annual average occupancy rate for hotels in 2018 stood at 43.2 percent and family/private accommodation at only 18.9 percent, with these figures slightly decreasing last year.
At the European level, August is the strongest month, with 3.5 times more overnight stays realised than in January. Back in August 2018, Croatia generated almost a third of its annual turnover, as much as 30.2 percent of nearly 90 million overnight stays. In the month with the worst traffic, February, Croatia realised a worrying 55 times less overnight stays than it did in August.
When it comes to Mediterranean countries, which Croatia can be better compared with than with Northern European countries such as the United Kingdom and Norway, who have strong economies that rely on far more than just tourism, behind Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece come France and Italy with a total of 36 percent of their tourist traffic realised in July and August.
Spain, the southwestern European country which has always been a hit with primarily Northern European tourists, acheives 28 percent of the annual share of its overnight stays in July and August. Malta stands out from the trend of the Mediterranean countries as one of the countries with the most even occupancy rate throughout the year. In addition to Malta come the Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, Poland, Finland, as well as Kosovo, all of which don’t rely that heavily on summer tourism.
Greece recorded a significant eighteen times fewer overnight stays during its worst month, which is also January, than it did during the height of the Greek tourist season – August. The Alpine countries, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland stand out from the rest of Europe, as all of them have two peak seasons, summer and winter.
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