Even though there is already a whole array of tourist facilities with high quality offer in Croatia, foreign markets still do not perceive Croatia as a destination for luxury tourism.
However, it is not at all easy for such facilities to operate in Croatia, due to high seasonality and poor airline connections with markets such as the United States and the United Kingdom, which are markets with a large number of potential guests. Branding of the luxury offer and repositioning on the market are the main goals of the Luxury Hotels Group, founded this spring within the Croatian Chamber of Commerce (HGK).

The US market is particularly interesting, not only because of its size (one-fifth of 320 million US inhabitants travel abroad), but also because American guests are especially fond of destinations with a rich cultural and historical heritage.

Around 11 million Americans visit Europe every year, in Croatia there were around 300,000 last year. By the beginning of this September this year, there were around 266,000 American tourists in Croatia.

However, the Americans still do not believe that Croatia has luxury hotels, thus one of the goals of the Luxury Hotels Group in cooperation with the Croatian Tourist Board is to convince them to the contrary.

The Group has currently had 16 hotels with a unique offer (gourmet, wine, heritage, boutique hotels, castle) such as Vestibul Palace Hotel in Split, Meneghetti in Bale, San Rocco in Brtonigla, hotels Kazbek and The Pucic Palace in Dubrovnik, hotels Bevanda and Navis in Opatija, Life Palace Heritage Hotel in Sibenik, a castle hotel Martinis Marchi Heritage in Maslinica on the island of Solta and Hotel Bastion in Zadar.

‘’Our goal is performance of all our group members under a common brand, in order to strengthen our performance on foreign markets. Among other things, we particularly target markets such as the USA and Great Britain, which is why we have teamed up with the Croatian Tourist Board and their branch offices on these markets. We have already received the first results of our cooperation. After our promoting activities some new potential partners i.e experts for luxury travel expressed their interest to work with Croatia”, said Antonia Urlic from the Luxury Hotels Group.

‘’So far we have had hotels mainly along the coast, but we would really like to see hotels on the continent in our group. We want to promote luxury offer of the whole Croatia’’, concluded Urlic.