How to Develop a Successful Tourist Product

When talking about tourism in general, just like in football, all Croatian citizens become tourism experts. Everyone has ideas about what could be done and where.

Realistically, developing a tourist product is not that easy if market rules are respected. It is even harder to develop a successful tourist product. And the hardest of all is to develop it in the pre-season and post-season. Success in creating and marketing a tourist product primarily depends on a real understanding of tourism as a phenomenon, tourists as specific consumers, and the tourist product as one or more activities that satisfy specific needs.

What kind of tourist product should be developed at all? From the perspective of restaurants, it is dinner; from the perspective of hotels, it is overnight stays; and from the perspective of sunbed renters, it is the rental of sunbeds. In fact, these are tourist products that can have characteristics that will make someone a tourist. However, in practice, these are always more complex combinations of different experiences that the guest assembles themselves or that someone else arranges for them. Unfortunately, Croatian tourism still operates according to the ‘do it yourself’ model in which tourists themselves assemble their experience through trial and error. Those who want an experience based on the ‘turnkey’ principle do not have many opportunities in Croatia to purchase a complex tourist product with high added value. In construction terms, instead of selling finished, built apartments and houses, we sell sand, wire, and cement.

Thanks to enthusiasts, we have several examples of good projects that are realized in the pre-season and post-season, but most products are realized in Croatia from June to September. The seasonality and spatial concentration of Croatian tourism are on the edge of danger, and in some periods and at some places, that edge has long been crossed. Just for that reason, it is worth considering the development of tourist products that we will actively manage demand for and direct it to areas and periods that suit us best.

The question arises of whose responsibility it is to manage demand. Why doesn’t the tourist market solve this problem by itself? Due to the insufficient critical mass of competent individuals in the tourism system, innovative and creative projects struggle to break through, and due to ignorance, there is no willingness to take risks. – When it comes to tourist attractions as the main comparative advantages, we are champions. The problem is that we do not know what to do with them, and therefore we mostly sell ‘views’, ‘entrances’, or ‘atmospheres’ instead of selling experiences with a high level of added value and a broader set of services. It is easy to sell a ticket to Plitvice Lakes in August. Why not organize a night tour with torches in small groups at that location? – asks Željko Trezner, a lecturer at Vern’s Department of Tourism and project manager for DMC development. Some agencies have repeatedly wanted to arrange tours with the Plitvice Management, for example, smaller tours with their own boats on the lakes, but they regularly receive rejections.

One of the most complex questions in product development is whether we can objectively evaluate our own resources because we often fail to recognize what is valuable to us if we do not know what others have. We often attribute too much importance to something unimportant or completely neglect something exceptionally attractive to guests from other countries. The best example is Velebit, an important part of the karst phenomenon in the triangle of Karlovac – Zadar – Rijeka, a space for a fascinating view of sunsets and a beautiful indented coastline, the highway under that mountain as one of the most beautiful European panoramic roads, and, of course, a wonderful and challenging terrain for hiking. European motorcyclists come here on their own; some famous motorcyclists/travel writers have declared the section of the highway from Senj to Paklenica as one of the most beautiful roads in Europe: on one side the sea, on the other the mountain. However, no one systematically brings a group, for example, of foreign ‘off-road’ motorcyclists, who would prefer an escort, to Croatia.

The next question is what to do with the resource we have identified as tourist potential and who might be interested in it. Without a real understanding of the preferences and behaviors of consumers who engage in activities elsewhere that we want to offer, we cannot provide a proper answer. And how can we best understand the preferences and behaviors of consumers? We can understand what they do and why. To attract foreign hikers, motorcyclists, meteorologists, dendrologists, agronomists, geologists, we can initially seek answers among their Croatian colleagues. Ozren Grbavčić, the owner of the Istrian agency Illustris travel, says that his agency tries to find out clients’ needs by infiltrating among them to learn who they are and what they want. Opinions are divided among DMC agencies on whether tourist groups should be led by tourist guides or specialists in a specialized field. Many claim that specialists often do not have developed social skills to assess what guests need and how to impress them, so they prefer to rely on classic guides. This dilemma somewhat resembles the journalism profession: is a text by an art historian who is literarily gifted of higher quality than that of a journalist who systematically follows culture as one of the sectors? – We like to work with experts because we cannot be experts in everything, especially when it comes to cultural tours. For example, we led a tour with a group of farmers from France who wanted to know something about livestock farming in Croatia, so our entire program was directed towards that, especially the presentation of boškarin. A tourist guide can learn a few sentences about it, but such serious groups should still be provided with the most competent experts whose level of knowledge matches theirs – explains Grbavčić.
The agency Katarina Line, which creates active cruising tours in the pre-season and post-season, has established partnerships with about ten guides who already know how cruises work and the markets from which guests come. – Our guide on the active cruise must speak a foreign language well, know the characteristics of the sport in question, and must also be a good tourist guide, so we invest a lot of effort and resources in training and monitoring the results of guides, who must also receive good compensation for their work – says Filip Gržinčić from Katarina Line. He notes that ministries insist on programs in the pre-season and post-season and encourage them, but apart from in larger cities (Split, Opatija, Zadar, Dubrovnik), shops and hospitality establishments close by mid-September because they do not find interest in continuing operations due to a lack of hotel guests. – Our travelers do not experience most destinations as they should during those terms because they are practically dead in the pre-season and post-season – explains Gržinčić. This is a real obstacle for all organizers of specialized tours who do not bring a large mass of guests. No restaurant, let alone a shop, will open its doors in February in front of which stand twenty people. They will only accommodate you if you have been collaborating with them for years and they know that you will continuously bring them guests.

Events are a good trigger for increasing the value of destinations. It is difficult to count how many are held in Croatia throughout the year; every ‘town’ has its fishing festival, its folklore group, church choir, or sports race. However, a donkey race may be interesting to some tourist (or the mayor of Zagreb) when they are already at the destination, but they certainly will not cross half of Europe for it. Events in Croatia should be fully valued, among them finding those that have the potential to break into the international market, while others should be enhanced with added value (if they do not already have it).

Romana Lekić, head of the Department of Tourism at Vern, says that events as a reason for coming to Croatia are rare.

– Events not only provide additional value but also create an atmosphere, a special vibration in the destination, which we in the profession call ‘space of flow’. This refers to those that have been embraced by the local population, which then truly ‘lives’ these events, as is the case with the Rijeka Carnival and Špancirfest. Here, the initiative and motivation of the local community and special associations are also important, where the local population enjoys and activates itself in the organization and implementation of the event – says Lekić.

The pre-season and post-season are also ideal for attracting domestic guests, who are too few compared to foreigners, although their number is also increasing. However, they also need to be attracted somehow. Ivan Pukšarić, the owner of the excursion complex Zeleni kut on the Mrežnica with a well-visited restaurant with a 50-year tradition, organizes a belote tournament in March, for example, which attracts about a hundred participants from all over Croatia. The annual growth of tournament visitors is about 10% in arrivals and 15% in revenue. The Pukšarić family has also invested in additional facilities: a water playground, a climbing wall, and a trampoline, a land playground, beach volleyball, small football, archery, and most of these facilities are free for visitors. The restaurant collaborates with the Huck Finn agency from Zagreb in creating multi-day package trips where Pukšarić’s facility is the base, and around it, rafting and kayaking on the Mrežnica, sightseeing of Plitvice Lakes, cycling along the banks of the rivers Dobra and Mrežnica, excursions to Klek, northern Velebit, and similar activities are offered.

The development of tourist products in Croatia, unfortunately, is exposed to relatively higher ‘input’ costs than in other countries due to the low utilization of available capacities and high costs of basic production factors. Therefore, it is necessary to develop products that are interesting to price-sensitive guests. In doing so, it is necessary to avoid a positioning strategy with lower prices at the beginning of sales because it raises doubts about the quality and uniqueness of the product. A strategy of skimming with higher prices at the beginning of the product’s life cycle should be applied.

One of the initial costs of a tourist product is the creation of package visuals, for which a photographer and designer must be paid. An attractive visual is lacking in many tourist products precisely because of savings on these costs. There are also internal costs of creating and optimizing the website, translations into other languages, inclusion in the Google Ads system and social networks, which amounts to at least a thousand euros. Participation in specialized fairs lasting three to four days costs an additional five thousand euros (travel expenses, per diems, booth rental), so, according to the organizers of special programs, the minimum cost of launching a new product is fifty thousand kuna, which many organizers do not have. HTZ’s funds intended for joint advertising would certainly help them a lot, but they are most often distributed to agencies based on the number of tourists they bring to Croatia, which excludes small specialized agencies from the game. They often charge three times more for their product, so owners of specialized agencies believe that funds should be allocated based on revenue or marketing effectiveness of projects, not based on the number of tourists.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in the entire process is how to ultimately sell the product we have worked hard on. One of the most common mistakes in thinking is that direct sales are the best. This is true only in the case of marketing a unique product with an exceptionally high added value, provided that actual revenues can cover the costs of promotion and sales. – In all other cases, especially if new products are just being developed, it is wise to rely on various types of intermediaries in the tourist market, such as travel agencies, tour operators, various organizations, and associations. Collaboration with intermediaries is especially important due to the assistance they provide in product development. They can timely help with all the mistakes that may arise in communication with a demanding audience, which would otherwise be fatal in individual communication – comments Trezner. If the product is intended for a very narrow, price-inelastic group of users, and the provider is a top expert in the field they offer, it has never been easier to contact individual users through various forms of electronic communication, primarily on social networks.
According to the experiences of creators of products with added value, to achieve the set goal, for the product to succeed, it needs five years of continuous implementation. The biggest problem is always the initial capital. It would be ideal for creators of demanding tourist projects to have business angels behind them like those in the IT industry and startups. However, unlike some other industries, at the center of the value of a tourist product are people, so its success ultimately depends most on a creative team of enthusiasts who believe in their idea and are ready to fight for it. Even if it is just for a handful of tourists who love to watch birds through binoculars and mimic their sounds.