Celebrating World Tourism Day
The 44th anniversary of World Tourism Day is being celebrated, and the motto of this year's celebration is Tourism and Peace. In 1980, already relatively long ago, it was decided that 27 September, since it is the time of the year when summer ends in the northern hemisphere, will symbolically become a day that will remind us year after year of the importance of tourism and the need for continuous investment in that sector, as well as the importance of monitoring innovations to achieve and maintain competitiveness on the global market.
The theme Tourism and Peace was chosen at a time when several major conflicts are taking place in the world, and with this motto, the idea was to send a message that tourism can indeed be an accelerator of change and positively influence the promotion of peace and understanding between different nations and cultures.
Tourism, as one of the fastest-growing global sectors, plays a key role in stimulating economic development and creating jobs, so the importance of monitoring statistical data from this area is not surprising. Indicators such as the number of tourist arrivals and nights, the length of their stay, the occupancy of accommodation capacities or average expenditures per trip enable monitoring the effects of tourism and are a starting point for planning future tourism activities and development strategies.
In 2023, there were 92.4 million tourist nights in commercial accommodation establishments, which was an increase of 2.6% compared to 2022, and 19.5 million tourist arrivals, which was an increase of 9.7% compared to the previous year. But what was it like in 1980, the year when the World Tourism Day was first celebrated? At that time, there were almost half as many nights as in 2023, 53.6 million to be precise, and only 7.9 million arrivals, which was almost 12 million arrivals less than what the most recent data show.
According to the types of tourist resorts, the most tourist nights in 2023 were realised in seaside resorts, 85.3 million of them, which was 92.4% of the total realised nights. Concerning the structure of the total realised tourist nights in seaside resorts, 92.6% of them were realised by foreign tourists and 7.4% by domestic tourists.
When considering accommodation capacities, on 31 August 2023, there were 422 thousand rooms, apartments and camping sites available to tourists, with a total of 1.1 million permanent beds. Most of these rooms, apartments and camping sites, as many as 90.9% of them, were in seaside resorts. Compared to 2022, there were 1.7% more rooms, apartments and camping sites in seaside resorts, and 1.8% more permanent beds.
Croatian population aged 15 and over loves to travel, which is confirmed by the fact that in 2023 they took a total of 5.0 million private trips with overnight stays, out of which 65.4% were in Croatia and 34.6% abroad.
On average, six nights were spent on private trips with overnight stays both in Croatia and abroad, and the average expenditures per private trip with overnight stays in Croatia amounted to 281 euro and per private trip abroad to 471 euro.
As the motto of this year’s World Tourism Day implies, tourism is much more than travelling and enjoying discovering new cultures and destinations: it connects people and nations, contributes to cultural understanding and global connections, economic development of local communities and preservation of cultural heritage, and it supports sustainability of natural resources. We should be made aware of all this every day, not just one day a year.
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