May 18 (SeeNews) - Even though Croatia faced significantly lower tourism revenue in the last two pandemic years, the Adriatic country still has the highest share of tourism revenue in gross domestic product (GDP) in the European Union, a local think-tank said.
Tourism revenue contributed 18.3% of Croatia's GDP in 2018 and 21% in 2019, before its share declined to 8.9% and 15.8% in 2020 and 2021, respectively, due to the negative impact of the pandemic on demand for tourist services, Institute of Economics Zagreb (EIZ) said on Tuesday in a research paper comparing Croatia with its Mediterranean EU peers.
The research was carried out as part of Mastercard's Uplift tourism project to aid micro, small and medium-sized tourism companies.
With 0.26 beds per citizen Croatia holds by far the highest position among the Mediterranean EU countries in terms of concentration of accommodation capacities measured as the ratio of the number of beds available for tourists to the country's population of 3.89 million.
Croatia's accommodation capacity reached 1.05 million beds in 2020, up 31.2% compared to 2012 - the base year in the EIZ study.
Only Portugal posted a similar growth rate (34%), but that country has a much lower concentration of tourism offering in terms of the number of beds compared to size of its population - of 0.06, the EIZ said.
The other Mediterranean EU countries mark lower growth in accommodation capacities, while in Greece the accommodation capacities in the period under review declined by 21.7%, according to the EIZ.
“The good news is that compared to the Mediterranean peers, Croatia marks significant growth in demand for its tourism product,” Maruska Vizek from EIZ said in a statement.
(1 euro=7.535 Croatian kuna)