June the 28th, 2025 – Croatian Tourism Minister Tonči Glavina has praised June’s excellent tourist numbers, but has issued yet another warning surrounding prices in the sector.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, Croatian Tourism Minister Tonči Glavina was a recent guest of the podcast “Business World with Ilija Jandrić”. During it, he spoke about the results of the tourist season so far, the results of the legal reform aimed at limiting the number of apartments, hotel construction, sustainable tourism, the consequences of fires and climate change, and of course – the high prices.
the croatian tourism minister commends 2025’s initial 6 months
He presented the first data on tourism results in June, although the final information will only be published on July the 2nd. “June has been fantastic. We can be very happy with June, as well as with the entire initial six months of 2025. This is the first transitional time because in tourism, we tend to look at three transitional times – firstly after six months, secondly after July and August (the two peak summer months in which we have the majority of our business) and then the third transitional time which is the rest of the year, or the post-season.
We really shouldn’t sit and look at these numbers of arrivals and overnight stays as some kind of measure of success, the prism of success isn’t and shouldn’t be solely through that. However, if we are going to look at them as important, they’re definitely significant in the pre-season and post-season, but not in the main part of the season. In that part of the year, we aren’t realistically looking for any more increases because that doesn’t at all go hand in hand with our transformation into a sustainable tourist destination. For the most part, though, these first six months have really been very good,” assured the Croatian Tourism Minister.
He also commented on media articles about the poor start of the season that have been circulating until recently. “The first and second months of 2025 were roughly at the same level as last year, in March, we saw a 20 percent drop, but in April we saw annual growth of 20 percent. In May, which is being mentioned as having been a gap, there were 15 percent fewer guests than last year. However, that was due to holidays and school holidays. At one point, June was 25 percent better than last year, and now towards the end it has stabilised at 11 percent more arrivals and 19 percent more overnight stays. That means that we cannot look at the pre-season on a mere month by month basis, but instead as a whole. When we draw the line, we’re currently up about 4 percent in arrivals and 5 percent in overnight stays on an annual basis compared to 2024,” said the Croatian Tourism Minister.
is croatia really a very expensive destination now?
“We’ve definitely increased our prices, and at the same time we’re still a country that offers a very good price-quality ratio. Let our people not be fooled by these numbers that I said at the beginning of the show – we don’t have the same structure of guests who come in the pre-season and in the main season. In the pre-season, we have guests who spend more, have more purchasing power, have much more non-boarding spending, stay in better facilities and are willing to spend a little more. In July and August, we tend to have a lot of so-called budget guests who are looking for the cheapest possible accommodation and literally watch how they will spend every single euro. That’s to illustrate that a good pre-season doesn’t at all mean that the main summer season will also be extraordinary and that prices should be raised immediately. In fact, it’s quite the opposite of that,” Glavina warned.
He also praised the results of the legal reforms, the goal of which was to limit the construction of new apartments that will be left sitting empty for 300 days a year. “We conducted an analysis within the eVisitor system on June the 10th and compared it with previous years. Last year, by that date, we’d grown by 26,000 beds in apartments, and this year, by June the 10th, that increase was only 7,500. That means that we’ve successfully more than halved the number. That was the goal, we wanted to reduce all this new private accommodation coming to the market, we wanted to reduce this attack on space and to preserve our most valuable resource – our coastline,” the Croatian Tourism Minister concluded.
