Croatia Travel Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Dubrovnik hotels’

The online price comparison site, trivago.co.uk recently compared European beach destinations to find out where, exactly, visitors were happiest. It turns out that Dubrovnik scored an astounding number 5 out of the 50 destinations reviewed. So how was customer satisfaction measured? By analyzing over 380,000 hotel reviews posted on online booking sites like booking.com for more than 4,000 hotels. It turns out that the 47 reviewed hotels in Dubrovnik have an average rating of 78.77 points out of 100. The five-star Hilton Imperial Dubrovnik lifted the average quite a bit by scoring a whopping 89 out 100 on the scale.

I say congratulations to the hoteliers of Dubrovnik. It looks like all the renovation, construction, reconstruction and upgrading has paid off big time.

Wanna buy a hotel? You’ll have an array of choices on the Croatian coast but there are a few catches. Reuters’ reporter Adam Tanner has penned a detailed article on the problems facing Croatia’s government as they try to unload hotels that dated from the Tito period.

You would think that owning a hotel on Korcula Island, for example, would be a license to print money but nearly 20 years after Croatia’s launch into privatisation, the hotels in Korcula are still state-owned. Buyers are shying away.

First of all, the hotels are fairly outdated and require a substantial injection of capital to bring them into line with today’s expectations. But investors want to see a return on the investment and, so far, what they’re seeing is a thicket of problems. Korcula residents also want a piece of the pie in the form of a stake in the company, just as Hvar residents did with the privatisation of some of  their state-owned hotels some years ago.

Although not mentioned in the article, islanders want a commitment from the hotels to keep staff employed, or at least paid, for an entire year, not just during the tourist season. Islanders want to see young people stay on the island and build lives, not just breeze in for a few months every summer. They have a point but from the POV of an investor, the tourist season is too short to make this kind of a commitment.

Some privatisations have gone well. Mr. Tanner refers to the lavish reconstruction of the Hotel Excelsior in Dubrovnik as an example. But other hotels in Dubrovnik (the ravaged Belvedere for example), Rab, Opatija, Trogir and Hvar are still waiting for their Prince Charming.

Having stayed in both state-owned and privately owned accommodation in Croatia, I can tell you that there’s a big difference. Many of the state-owned hotels are throwbacks to the 70s both in design, amenities and service. Concrete-block architecture, chunky TVs and irritable waiters provide a stark contrast with the newer luxury hotels with their enthusiastic staff. Let’s hope that the situation sorts itself out.

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