engleski

(Post)pandemic tourism as a new challenge to marginal areas – selected case studies of mountain and remote island destinations in Croatia

The Covid-19 outbreak has led to a sharp decline in tourism and caused major changes in travel patterns around the world. Croatia, which bases its tourism on the sun and sea product, reached its historic record in tourism in 2019 with 20 million tourist arrivals and 91 million overnight stays. Similar to other Mediterranean countries, mobility restrictions, the decline of air travel, fear of disease, testing, or quarantine upon returning home largely kept people from travelling, resulting in Croatia reaching only 40% of the previous year's tourism in 2020. Although tourism partially recovered in 2021, it was confirmed that some areas recorded better (or less bad) results and could indicate the future trends and changes in tourism. In addition to travel restrictions, changes in tourism are influenced by personal reactions reflected in motivation and behavioural changes that could reinvigorate and increase interest in escapism and slowness in tourism and directed tourism reflectors toward small island and rural communities, private (and remote) accommodations, and intact natural and rural environments. This paper tends to deepen the existing knowledge on tourism trends and changes in pandemic tourism in the Mediterranean region, particularly questioning the role of the emerged new values of marginal areas in pandemic and their potential for demarginalization. It presents the impact of Covid-19 on tourism in marginalized areas of Croatia in pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, based on case studies in two geographically different marginal areas of Croatia: the mountainous area of Gorski Kotar and the remote southern Adriatic islands of Lastovo and Mljet. Results were obtained using statistical data for the last year before the pandemic (2019) and the two pandemic years (2020 and 2021), as well as semi-structured interviews with tourism stakeholders to gain deeper insight into changes in tourism and its impact in the studied areas.

marginal areas ; coastal tourism ; mountain tourism ; Covid-19 ; Croatia

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