HTZ Launches Collaboration with Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor, Seeks Directors for Offices

The Tourist Council of the Croatian Tourist Board (HTZ) decided on Tuesday in Rovinj to establish a marketing collaboration with Lonely Planet and TripAdvisor and to announce a competition for directors of HTZ offices in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Sweden, and China.

The marketing collaboration with TripAdvisor includes the integration of content, images, and videos on the portal, as well as advertising through multi-click banners. It is the leading global tourist portal for travel planning and accommodation booking, operating in 49 countries and covering more than 7 million accommodation units, attractions, and restaurants worldwide. The portal achieves 455 million visitors monthly and contains over 570 million reviews.

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Lonely Planet is one of the leading global travel media outlets, with over 100 million visitors and more than 500 million page views annually. The collaboration with Lonely Planet includes the creation of personalized micro-websites and content within the Lonely Planet portal featuring original promotional travel videos. Each piece of content will be shared via social media, and once the campaign concludes, the published content will remain permanently on the site.

HTZ Director Kristjan Staničić stated that tourism promotion and branding require a high level of professionalism, creativity, and innovation, which is why HTZ collaborates with globally recognized and influential partners in implementing key promotional activities.

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Reflecting on the competition for directors in HTZ offices, he expressed confidence that HTZ would find the best candidates who would make a strong and positive contribution to the future trends of Croatian tourism.

Tourism Minister Gari Cappelli emphasized that the demand for Croatia has never been higher, as confirmed by announcements from the largest tourism fairs and markets, where reservations for 2019 are already being made.

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– In addition to traditional markets, we are seeing increasing interest in distant markets, which will undoubtedly become a much more significant segment of overall tourist traffic with the further opening of new flight routes, Cappelli said.

In response to a journalist’s question about the potential impact of tensions with Russia on trends from that market, Cappelli stated that a realistic increase of 15 percent in the number of tourists from Russia is expected, which should be supported by the establishment of five new airline routes.

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– It is too early to draw conclusions within 24 hours about what the latest events in relations with Russia will bring to our tourism. We will see based on our additional steps, Cappelli concluded.

At the Tourist Council meeting, funds were also approved for the implementation of the “Sports Croatia” project, which encompasses special forms of marketing and PR collaboration within top sports projects and events expected to have a positive impact on positioning Croatia as an attractive year-round tourist destination, as well as strengthening the national tourism brand.

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The call for expressions of interest for the implementation of the project was published from February 1 to 12, and by the decision of the Tourist Council, collaboration on internationally recognized projects and events, including the Tour of Croatia and ATP Croatia Open Umag, was approved.