January the 16th, 2026 – Croats spent record sums on trips abroad in 2025, totalling a massive two billion euros throughout 12 months.
As Jadranka Dozan/Poslovni Dnevnik writes, according to data from the eVisitor system, Croatia recorded two percent more tourist arrivals (a total of 21.8 million), and the number of overnight stays exceeded 110 million overnight stays for the first time in 2025, which is one percent more than the year before. It is expected that financial indicators will also have record-breaking results, at least nominally speaking.
The Croatian National Bank (CNB) recently revised downwards the estimate of expected revenues from the export of tourism services and now expects less than one percent growth compared to the 15 billion euros recorded the previous year, which means an increase of around 150 million euros. Considering that prices in the category of Restaurants and Hotels increased by an average of seven to eight percent last year, this means, much like the year before, a genuine decline.
The CNB estimates that tourism revenues as a percentage of GDP will continue to fall over the next two years. At the same time, when it comes to tourism itself, the balance of payments data has been showing increasing outflows from travel for a long time now. In addition to the fact that last year, only guests from Germany (22.3 million) recorded more overnight stays in Croatia than domestic guests (who realised 13.8 million), Croats are also increasingly travelling abroad.
On the one hand, this reflects the real growth in wages or disposable income and the fact that a significant number of people can afford more than they could before. On the other hand, increased spending on foreign travel is to some extent also driven by the search for cheaper destinations by Croats who were prompted to do so by increases in Croatian prices of tourism and hospitality services in more recent years.
In any case, according to balance of payments data on the export and import of tourism-related services, in the first nine months of last year, Croats spent 1.93 billion euros on foreign (private and business) travel, which is 12.3 percent or around 210 million euros more than during the same period last year. At the same time, revenues from foreign guests recorded a year-on-year growth of only 1.7 percent by the end of September, but due to the much larger base on the revenue side, in absolute terms it is an equal, i.e. slightly higher increase.
If we look at the three summer months alone, 780 million euros flowed out of Croatia from travel abroad, of which 640 million euros were spent on private travel, or approximately 100 million more than last summer. In year-on-year comparisons of foreign inflows during the main tourist season, the figures are more or less stagnant; 9.04 billion euros were generated, or around 20 million euros less than in the first three months of the previous year.
On a full-year basis, the CNB estimates that tourism inflows throughout 2025 will be barely one percent higher than the year before. Estimates aren’t being made for outflows, but with the dynamics from the first three quarters taken into consideration, and considering around 690 million euros in the last quarter of 2024, it is realistic to expect that around 2.7 billion will have flowed out from travel abroad in 2025, compared to around 2.4 billion euros during the previous year.
These amounts include both private and business travel, with the amount for private travel (which saw 1.52 billion in the first three quarters of the year) set to exceed two billion euros for the first time.
These figures in themselves have neither a positive nor a negative connotation, although it is said that travel (both domestically and internationally) enriches people. In addition, the trend of increasing preference for (and) foreign travel is good to the extent that it reflects a higher (average) standard of living.
It’s clear that since 2020, wages in Croatia have increased by an average of 60 percent, and last year alone by 10 percent. Although this year, according to the CNB forecasts, a slowdown to six percent is expected, it is expected that nominal wage growth will exceed the inflation rate in the next two years.
However, it is also for good reason that last week, when speaking about the challenges of tourism 2026, the Minister of Tourism and Sports Tonči Glavina emphasised that one of the important factors in this context will be price competitiveness.
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