Croatia 7th on TOP 20 World Tourism Locations of the Future

Vis (Photo credit Ante Babic)

Croatia has been ranked 7th on fDi’s inaugural ranking of global tourism locations with the best potential for investment.

The first edition of the Global Tourism Locations of the Future 2017/2018 for fDi Magazine, the Intelligence division of the Financial Times, was topped by Thailand, with Croatia ranked in 7th place out of 43 destinations around the world.

Croatia was one of three nations which also received the ‘Editor’s Choice Award’ for countries punching above their weight when it came to investment in tourism potential.

Thailand, whose tourism sector increased by more than 200% in the last 5 years, was ranked No.1 for the best potential for investment in tourism.

The Maldives was second, while Hong Kong was No.3.

“The country has been making progress on infrastructure to support increasing tourist numbers (international visitors increased at an average annual rate of more than 6% in the five years to 2015). The reconstruction and extension of its airports, which includes a new €300m terminal building at the Franjo Tuđman International airport in Zagreb, the reconstruction of airports in Split and Dubrovnik, as well as plans to construct the 2.5-kilometres-long Pelješac Bridge connecting the mainland to the Pelješac peninsula, helped Croatia win the editor’s choice award for Infrastructure Upgrades. Croatia also won the award for Accommodation Upgrades. It saw the opening of 40 new or refurbished hotels in 2016, a figure set to rise to 50 in 2017,” fDi writes, before adding.

New Zagreb Airport  (photo: Zagreb Airport/Facebook)

“The number of five-star hotels on offer in the country has increased by 44% in the six years to 2016, while the number of four-star hotels went up by 71%. During the same period, the number of two-star establishments decreased by 29%, thus improving the quality of accommodation on offer. Croatia boasts 61 marinas with more than 20,000 berths available on the country’s famous islands – a distinguishing feature that earned it the Cruise Industry Investment award.”

Hotel Salona Palace opened in Solin recently (Photo: Hotel Salona Palace)

fDi says that Croatia is becoming increasingly important as a filming location for both TV shows and films, including HBO’s Game of Thrones series and more recently Robin Hood.

Mamma Mia 2 was the latest film shot in Croatia (Photo: Instagram)

“Some 250,000 tourists are believed to have visited as a direct result of the Game of Thrones franchise, helping the country win the Film Industry specialism award,” fDi writes.

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To create a shortlist data using specialist online tools, destinations were determined using the following parameters:

Countries with at least 10% of GDP derived from tourism receipts; and/or
Countries with at least 10% of all FDI projects in the tourism cluster

Countries scored up to a maximum of 10 points for each data point, which was weighted by importance to the FDI decision-making process in order to compile the overall ‘Tourism Locations of the Future 2017/18’ ranking.

In addition, surveys were collected under a sixth category, FDI Strategy, for which there were nine submissions. For these, the judging panel awarded bespoke Editor’s Choice awards.

Check out the full report here.