Conclusions from the International Charter Expo 2016, which just finished in Zagreb
Croatia leads the way when it comes to boat charter, a fact that is easily proven by numbers: 3500 charter boats, more than 60 000 rentals, 370 000 guests and 2,5 million overnight stays in charter in 2015. This is the conclusion of this year’s edition of a specialised nautical expo International Charter Expo 2016 – ICE’16 which finished on March 13, 2016.
This was the fourth edition of ICE, event organised by Jadranski skiperi in cooperation with the Croatian Chamber of Economy. As the Vice president of the Croatian Chamber of Economy stated, they recognised this project when it was nothing more than just an idea. Novelty in this year’s edition is the increasing importance of adventure tourism, which resulted in a completely new event within the original expo – International Adventure Expo 2016. Tino Prosenik, director of Jadranski skiperi expects that the increased interest in adventure tourism in Croatia will result in Adventure Expo becoming even larger than it’s older nautical counterparts.
“Number of very stressful jobs is increasing both in Europe and the rest of the world and people are looking for active and adventre holidays as stress relief. Croatia is already leading the way in yachting and charter so I don’t see a reason why we couldn’t become a global force in adventure tourism“ Prosenik stated. He also added that Croatia will probably profit from the uncertainty in urkey and Greece, but that, as a tourist country, we have to develop scenarios for any type of crisis situation since we are not expempt from possible crisis situations: „ If we are only selling the sun and sea, then just one oil tanker accident can destroy our entire tourism. We have to develop the industry in various directions and we cannot allow its dependence on just one or two factors“ Prosenik concluded.
