Quote: (01-30-2017 09:06 PM)John Michael Kane Wrote:
If you head to Europe, go off the beaten path and checkout Croatia and Serbia. Both have fairly low costs of living and decent culture.
While I definitely do agree with you about the culture part, Croatia is definitely neither off the beaten path nor does it have low costs of living.
Croatia is among the most popular beach vacation destinations for Germans, Austrians and Czechs, simply due to the fact that the country is reachable by car from those nations in an acceptable frame of time, being the only Mediterranean country besides Italy where you can pack your family or friends and actually drive to your beach vacation without even staying overnight on the way. Thus making it extremely popular with those families or couples who rather drive to the sea than flying there.
Also, Dubrovnik is ridiculously overpriced and overcrowded with tourists, in summer high season reaching a price level and congestion that makes New York City look like a cheap and sleepy farmers town in comparison.
Split and the other coastal towns such as Trogir, Sibenik etc are a little less pricey than Dubrovnik, but still flooded with tourists during the summer season.
16,3 million tourists visited Croatia last year, a country of 4,3 million inhabitants. In comparison: Italy had 48,6 million tourists last year, having 60,5 million inhabitants, which gives you an idea of ratios.
The only thing that's at the moment keeping even more tourists from flooding Croatia is the simple fact that their hotel industry can't even remotely keep the pace of building and opening new hotels according to the rising demand. Which in turn keeps potential visitors out due to either prohibitive prices or the simple fact that there are no rooms available anymore. Actually, most Western budget or mid-level hotel chains are totally unheard of in Croatia. And also, especially alongside the mostly very mountaineous coastline and in the narrow historic cities like Dubrovnik, there is simply no room anymore to build more hotels big-style.
It might be the case that Croatia is not widely visited by US travelers, since they don't even show up in the top 10 list of arrival numbers by country of origin, but that definitely doesn't mean that Croatia is off the beaten path for everyone else as well. As a matter of fact, Croatia as part of former Yugoslavia was highly popular as a beach vacation destinations as far back as in the 1980s, before the Yugoslavian wars started, an event that lead to the total collapse of tourism in Croatia between 1991 and 1995. Howver starting 1996, tourism slowly returned back, with tourist numbers in 2006 reaching pre-war levels again and since 2006 rised by a further 60%.