In January 2022, Croatia had an increase in tourist arrivals of 88.9% and an increase in tourist nights of 71.1% YoY.

The Croatian Tourist Board published their latest report on the tourist industry movements in January 2022 last week. In it, we can see that the tourist arrivals increased by 88.9% while tourist nights increased by 71.1% compared to January 2021. Several reasons could be attributed to this increase; higher vaccination numbers, looser movement restrictions, as well as the lower overall impact of the currently strongest variant of COVID-19 on the tourist industry, the Omicron.

To be more specific, Croatia had 178.75k arrivals in January, compared to 94.6k in January 2021, an increase of 88.9% YoY. Of the total number of arrivals in January, foreign tourists amounted to 76.99k (an increase of 313% over January 2021), accounting for 43.1% of all arrivals. At the same time, domestic tourist arrivals amounted to 101.77k (an increase of 34% YoY).

Looking over to the tourist nights, in January, Croatia noted 586.2k tourist nights compared to the 342.7k in the same period of 2021, an increase of 71.1% YoY. Of that, foreign tourist nights amounted to 388.3k (an increase of 169.2% YoY), while domestic tourist nights amounted to 247.1k (an increase of 60.2% YoY). This would also mean that the average stay per person decreased from 3.6 nights per person to 3.27 nights per person. This decrease can be attributed to the aforementioned looser movement restrictions, allowing tourists to visit more places in the same time period, lowering the average stay per person.

During January, the domestic tourists accounted for the largest amount of tourist nights (45%), while at the same time, out of the foreign tourists, most came from Bosnia and Herzegovina (7%), followed by Slovenia and Germany with 6% of the total overnight stays. If we were to observe the counties which had the most tourist nights in January, we have Istra leading the way, with 21.2%, followed by Grad Zagreb with 18.2% and Kvarner with 17.7%.