Situation analysis of Croatia as a touristic destination and suggestions for improvement

• Autor(a) principal: Dadic, Anamarija
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/19792
• topic: Millennials; Croatian tourism; Seasonality; Attractiveness; Safety; Social media activity; Positive e-WOM.; Turismo; Sazonalidade; Atratividade; Segurança; Media sociais -- Social media; e-WOM positivo; Estratégias de comunicação; Marketing

Croatian tourism is growing rapidly in the last couple of years. But it has been recorded that one of the biggest problems is seasonality of a destination and the importance of positioning Croatia as a year-round destination is of highly importance, as the Croatian Minister of Tourism Gari Cappeli said. Croatian economy is too dependent on tourism and it is too risky not to have precise strategical goals. Millennials are the presence and the future of traveling segment for any destination. Thus, it is important to research which drivers influence their choice of specific travel destination in a certain period of year. More than 45% of targeted population mentioned that they are not interested in Croatia in an off-season period (Chart 22, Appendix A) and the mission of this thesis is to provide information which motivators influence their decision to specify the strategies for the future tourism of Croatia. This study attempts to explore the association between these motivators: perception of safety, perception of good airlines connection, climate conditions, positive e-WOM, social media activity with the attractiveness of Croatia as a tourist destination. The findings of an online survey indicate that for the targeted population good climate conditions were in a moderate association with attractiveness of Croatia and the rest of the tested motivators were not significantly related to attractiveness. We have also discovered that social media engagement of consumers is strongly dependent on social media activity of Croatia as a destination. These results give us great space to manipulate targeted populations' interest in Croatia as a destination and to model specific strategical goals for the future of Croatian tourism.