August 26, 2020 – The Mayor of Vir, Kristijan Kapovic, and the Director of the Vir Tourist Board, Srdjan Liveric, are dissatisfied with the Croatian Tourist Board’s attitude towards the island of Vir, the most successful tourist destination in Croatia so far this season.
Namely, HRTurizam reports that in the last two August press releases of the Croatian National Tourist Board (CNTB) which list the most successful tourist destinations, Rovinj, Porec, Split, Medulin, Crikvenica, Dubrovnik, Umag, Zadar, Pula and Novalja were highlighted as the destinations with the most achieved tourist arrivals. Contrary to the practice of all previous years, the most successful destinations by realized tourist overnight stays are not mentioned, i.e., the total data of realized overnight stays in Croatia and the most successful counties are given.
The fact that the island of Vir has the most in Croatia until August 15 – about 1.5 million overnight stays with 80 percent of last year’s record numbers – is somehow bypassed at the peak of the summer season when the impression of the most successful and best destinations this year is created. In addition, Vir is the best destination in terms of overnight stays so far in August (433 thousand). With more than 700 thousand overnight stays (the only one in Croatia), it was also the most successful tourist destination in July.
However, the island of Vir simply does not appear in the CNTB’s press releases in August. It is this fact that raised the whole of Vir to its feet, and the Municipality of Vir and the tourist board are asking: Is the island of Vir fancy enough to be the best destination in Croatia?
Realized tourist overnight stays measure the success of each destination. This fact is covered up in the CNTB’s August media reports, according to a joint statement from the Municipality of Vir and the Tourist Board of Vir.
“They favor destinations in which billions of kuna of public state money have been invested so far, in communal, tourist and media-marketing infrastructure, so they are obviously bothered by Vir’s success, which has never gained anything from all this. However, when the CNTB’s coffers are filled, one does not ask where the money comes from, and a significant amount of money comes from Vir,” says the mayor of Vir, Kristijan Kapovic. Thus, millions from the island go directly to the CNTB, and hundreds of millions to the state budget, adding: “No one can deny that, but we can also ask ourselves whether the time has finally come for that money to start coming back to us. Vir certainly deserved it,” said Mayor Kapovic. The director of the Vir Tourist Board, Srcjan Liveric, agrees with him and feels first hand the complete neglect of the most popular Croatian destination.
“Several million kuna go every year to the CNTB’s coffers at the state and county level, and not a penny has been returned to some media and marketing campaign for Vir. We do not have the support of the system and the people within the CNTB who, among other things, are paid with real money and whose job it is to help us. We rely only on our own strength,” says director Liveric and adds that it is finally time for state institutions, tourism, and others, to start doing their job finally. “If we talk about tax revenues, hundreds of millions of kunas went to the budget from Vir. We would be satisfied if we got them back if we could arrange Vir as a top tourist destination in every sense,” adds the director of Vir Tourist Board.
In their joint statement, they point out that a significant phrase of the CNTB director Kristjan Stanicic, who, speaking about the most successful destinations so far, mentioned only some of them. Even then, the island of Vir was not mentioned in a single word, letter or thought. When the CNTB director was confronted with the fact that Vir was the destination with the most overnight stays in Croatia, he responded to the journalist’s statement somewhat reluctantly: “Vir is a specific destination of non-commercial accommodation.”
According to UNWTO, the umbrella organization of international tourism and the United Nations agency, a tourist is any person who stays or spends the night in a place where there is no residence address. Therefore, that person can have their own house, cottage, caravan, tent, or brothel in the destination if they want. Still, if they do not have a residence – it is a person who is statistically registered as a tourist. This is what is called non-commercial accommodation in the structure of tourist traffic, according to Vir.
Vir also emphasizes that for a local or foreign citizen to buy or build a house in Croatia where they do not reside, it is necessary to set aside at least about 700 thousand kuna for the minimum facility and then pay taxes and other receivables. In one move, a foreigner or a local person invests about 100 thousand euro to have a housing or tourism business facility, on which they pay taxes and all possible benefits, and further use the goods and services at the destination. Only one such owner of the facility, or a tourist in non-commercial accommodation, spends at least one million kuna at the start, and their further consumption at the destination takes place at least three or four times a year.
In the case of Vir, we are talking about foreigners who spend 16 nights on average in the previous part of the season and domestic guests with 26.7 nights on average. The so-called commercial tourists that the CNTB likes, spend 500 to 600 euro once for accommodation and maybe the same amount for goods and services at the destination where they stay for two to three days, or a maximum of one week. They do not spend more than ten or fifteen thousand kunas without a guarantee that they will be in Croatia again next year. In order to equalize the financial performance of a non-commercial guest in the future, commercial tourists would have to stay at the destination for 100 years or there would have to be 100 times more of them, Vir points out.
“All tourism professionals know that reports are made according to the realized overnight stays, because it is the practice of measuring tourist traffic. Now that Vir is the best, suddenly reports are made in arrivals, which is strange, to say the least,” concludes Liveric.
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