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Croats could spend up to 1.27 billion euros abroad in 2025

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In 2024, residents of Croatia spent approximately 1.03 billion euros on private multi-day trips abroad, with the average expenditure per trip amounting to around 551 euros.

In the same year, domestic spending on private multi-day trips was about 1.23 billion euros, bringing the total tourism expenditure of the population to approximately 2.27 billion euros.

Data from the DZS also shows that Croatian travelers made about 1.8 million private multi-day trips to foreign countries, out of a total of 5.46 million such trips.

Incomplete, but important signals for 2025.

For the year 2025, available sources show a mixed picture. The DZS continued to publish quarterly summaries of the tourism activity of the population in the first half of the year, but consolidated annual results on the behavior of the population have not yet been fully published at the level of the annual report while data for the mid-year was being collected.

At the same time, statistics on tourist traffic in accommodation (arrivals and overnight stays) show that in the first six months of 2025, there was an increase in tourist arrivals and overnight stays compared to the same period in 2024, with a particularly strong increase in domestic overnight stays, indicating vibrant tourist activity in the country, but this is not a direct measure of Croatian citizens’ spending abroad.

It is extremely important to emphasize the methodological nature of the data. Namely, the DZS’s survey ‘Tourist Activity of the Population’ is based on telephone surveys (CATI method) conducted in waves throughout the year. In the expenditure surveys, there is also the issue of non-response which is mitigated by imputation, so expenditure estimates are subject to a certain degree of uncertainty and confidence intervals that the DZS publishes alongside the original data, it is noted from the DZS.

Three scenarios for foreign spending in 2025.

According to DZS data, Croatian citizens spent about 1.03 billion euros on multi-day private trips abroad in 2024, with average expenditures of around 550 euros per trip. Based on quarterly indicators for 2025 and price trends, three scenarios for this year can be outlined.

In the conservative scenario, the number of trips remains at last year’s level, but due to inflation, average spending slightly increases. Total spending would then amount to about 1.06 billion euros, just 3 percent more than in 2024. In the baseline scenario, which seems the most likely, moderate growth in trips (about 5%) and higher costs per trip (about 7%) are expected. This would raise the total expenditures of Croatian tourists abroad to 1.16 billion euros, or about 12 percent more than last year.

In the optimistic scenario, with double-digit growth in both the number of trips and average spending, total outflow could reach 1.27 billion euros, which would be as much as 23 percent more than in 2024.

For the financial and tourism sector, this means that even in a more modest scenario, more than one billion euros of Croatian spending goes abroad annually, while under favorable conditions, this amount exceeds the level of 1.25 billion euros.

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