TUI to triple its tourism traffic to Croatia

One of the world's largest tour operators TUI will triple its tourism traffic to Croatia this year from the 70,000 tourists last year to more than 200,000 passengers, will enhance its investments in Croatia and is interested in the southern Kupari resort, TUI's CEO Johan Lundgren said on Thursday after meeting with Croatian Tourism Minister Darko Lorencin at the ITB tourism show in Berlin.

We are increasing our tourism traffic toward Croatia because we see this as a good market to develop our operations and we have come across cooperation with tourism organisations and companies, we are investing a lot of money and we want to succeed and plan large growth in the next five years and possibly increasing the number of passengers to more than 500,000, Lundgren said.

He underscored that TUI was interested in the Kupari project but also some other localities in Dalmatia, Split and Brijuni Island.

In expectation of support from Croatian government and local authorities TUI believes that local partners, hoteliers, airports and others in the industry are important in order to do a good job.

TUI offers end-to-end customer experience to 30 million customers in 31 major source markets.

"Over the past two years TUI has increased its business in Croatia. They have big plans and are interested in the Kupari complex and have informed us of their intentions in that regard," Lorencin told the press.

He added that the next step in the Kupari project was to invite binding offers in an effort to find a strategic partner to revitalise the resort near Dubrovnik, and that this would probably be done by March 19.

In the first round of the tender in mid-March last year six investors expressed interest in their non-binding offers - Karisma Hotels Adriatic-KHA (a consortium of the Agrokor food producer, TUI and the Mexican Karisma International hotel chain), the Valamar Group, the Turkish Rixos Group (which already owns a hotel in Dubrovnik), a veterans' association from Dubrovnik, the Avenue Group from Moscow and the Titan real-estate agency (allegedly backed by Russian capital).

(Hina)