The spring and summer tourist season has been highly successful for Croatia. The data suggest all records might be broken regarding the number of visitors and overnight stays.
In just the first seven months of 2016 from January to July, more than 8.4 million tourists arrived in the country. This represents an increase of 9.2% compared with the same period last year.
The positive trend is also reflected in the number of overnight stays. That is an increase of 8.8% to 39,439,451. 7.4 million of these were foreign overnight stays, representing an increase of 9.7%. Domestic tourism arrivals also increased, by 5.9%.
The majority of tourists (87.5% and 7,345,402 tourists) coming to Croatia in the spring and the summer tourist season stated that their main aim was the Adriatic coast. Particularly the Istria region flourished, with 2.1 million tourist arrivals. The interior of the country recorded 1,048,378 tourist arrivals and an increase of 7.9%.
Main source markets
The five strongest markets in the first half of the year (in terms of the proportion of overnight stays) were Germany (18.3%), Slovenia (10.9%), Austria (8.6%), Czech Republic (6.7%) and Poland (6.3%). It is worth nothing that the biggest growth of tourism inflow was from the United Arab Emirates (144%) and India (80%).