engleski

Factors influencing tourist spending in Istria

Tourism is a major driver of economic development in Croatia. Either directly or indirectly, tourism generates more than 25 percent of the country’ s gross domestic product and accounts for over 40 percent of all exports, placing this industry among the key components of the national economy and foreign texchange. Croatia and Istria possess a highly active tourism potential that needs to be valorised to a much greater extent in order to create a distinctive identity of the tourism offering that will lead to greater competitive ability, ensure a better position on the marketplace and help to increase tourist spending. Average daily tourist spending per guest is a basic indicator of tourism development for a country or destination. In recent years, tourist spending generated in Istria, Croatia’ s most developed tourism destination, has been considerably lower than in other Mediterranean destinations and some destinations in Croatia. There are number of reasons for this. The hypothesis is that the factors impacting on the generation of such a level of tourist spending include the existing structure and quality of basic and complementary lower-category accommodation facilities ; unsatisfactory quality and range of services ; seasonality of business and low occupancy rates ; the condition of the traffic infrastructure ; dissatisfaction with the entertainment, experience and adventure offerings ; and a small number of facilities providing selective forms of the tourism offering (theme tourism, adventure tourism, health tourism, congress and incentive tourism, nautical and rural tourism). On the tourist market, there is an obvious trend in the demand for specialised hotels (all-inclusive hotels, wellness, club hotels, artistic and romantic hotels ; hotels for gourmets, singles, tennis players, golf players, etc.), with conventional hotels increasingly losing ground. Based on research conducted, the aim of this paper is to establish and prove the formulated hypotheses, their individual impact on the generation of low tourist spending, and the measures and activities that can be taken to eliminate the obstacles to achieving higher tourist spending.

tourist spending; supply; demand; aims; measure and action

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