Edis Felić: Cottage Owners Had to Prove Ownership Along with Registration

My interlocutor, who lives in central Croatia, has a cottage in a seaside town. Every year when he goes on vacation, he goes to the tourist office of that town to register his stay. In his cottage, he also hosts his friends and is required to register them and pay the residence fee for them. He says he has always done it this way because it is not worth the risk of an inspector arriving, who could easily find unregistered guests. However, this year, he faced difficulties from the Croatian Tourist Board (HTZ), which did not find a way to inform cottage owners that they must bring proof of ownership when registering.

Back for the Paper

My interlocutor is actually a relative of my colleague and friend, a very honest and principled person. Although I spoke with his relative over the phone, I got the impression that he does not differ from my friend. He came on vacation, went to register his stay, and there they asked him for proof of ownership. He asked them why, and they told him it was due to a new application that was installed this year. Essentially, this application could not pull data from the old database, so people had to bring proof of ownership to have it manually entered into the new system at the tourist office. This was undoubtedly a hassle for cottage owners, who had to find various ways to bring proof of ownership.
– You know, when you go on vacation, you don’t carry the ownership deed with you – my interlocutor lamented.
And he is not the only one who had such a problem, so people either had to return or if someone from the family was in the apartment, they had to explain that the ownership deed was in this or that drawer or somewhere else, so they should send it by mail or bus. An additional problem is that these so-called weekenders could not register their guests either, because to register them, they must be recorded as owners, and the tourist offices did not have that information. I can imagine those who were shocked because they had to go back for the confirmation, and I am sure some of them decided not to register themselves or their guests. It was a risk because if an inspection came, they would not have understanding for the fact that they could not register.
The HTZ states that this is a new eVisitor system in use since January 1, and that the problem is that different systems have been used across the country until now.

Poor Communication

However, that is not an excuse because I contacted a computer expert who says there is a special data migration program from old systems, but the HTZ did not implement it. One of the reasons is that they used systems where that data was not entered previously, but that was not the case everywhere, for example, in my interlocutor’s case. A data migration program could have been created, and where there were no owner data before, it really had to be done this way, i.e., requiring proof of ownership.
But let’s set all that aside and accept, conditionally speaking, that collecting data could not have been organized differently. Our biggest criticism of the HTZ is that it did not, for example, send out information through the media every now and then that cottage owners should bring proof of ownership with them. This would certainly have resulted in far fewer problems than there were. Thus, it did not have good communication with cottage owners and did not consider that ‘weekenders’ could be penalized if caught by inspectors, as well as their guests, for not registering their stay. Fortunately, as far as we know so far, there have been no such consequences.