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Croatia's 121 boating ports generated a total revenue of HRK 753 million without Value Added Tax (VAT) in 2015, which was an increase of 5.1% on the year, with the highest increase in revenue being recorded in services at those ports, the State Bureau of Statistics (DZS) has reported. Even though the major part of revenue or almost 70% referred to the rental of berths, last year revenue from rentals dropped by 1.6% y-on-y. Revenue from rentals in 2015 amounted to HRK 519 million. Last year there was a total of 121 boating ports in Croatia, nine more than in 2014, with around 17,350 berths. Seventy of these ports were marinas while the remaining 51 were other ports.

Croatian Deputy Tourism Minister Robert Pauletic met with Russian government officials in charge of tourism at one of Russia's largest tourism fairs, MITT, which opened in Moscow on Wednesday. Pauletic met with Olga Yarilova, head of the Tourism and Regional Policy Department, and Olga Andonieva, acting head of the International Cooperation Department of the Russian Ministry of Culture, who expressed their satisfaction over the establishment of a Russian-Croatian Working Group on Tourism Cooperation.

All eight national and eleven nature parks in Croatia can now be found on a single web site providing information for visitors, the Environment and Nature Protection Ministry told a press conference on Wednesday. The web site - www.parkovihrvatske.hr - is available in Croatian, English, German and Italian. The project was prepared as part of the PARCS project conducted over the past two years by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Croatia and the ministry with a grant from the Global Environmental Fund (GEF), the head of Croatia's UNDP office, Sandra Vlasic, said and added that the value of the grant for the entire project, to continue until the end of 2017, was almost five million dollars.

Vukovar and other areas of Vukovar-Srijem County have great potential to develop their tourism from Danube river cruises, but the current offer does not satisfy visitors on stopovers in Croatia, a discussion on international Danube cruises heard in Vukovar on Tuesday. Presenting the results of a survey of international river cruises in Croatia, Zrinka Marusic of the Tourism Institute said that the most effective way to attract more cruise ships to Vukovar was through direct marketing and contact with tour operators.

Based on bookings and announcements, Croatia can expect 5-6 percent more German tourists this year, which is a considerable increase compared with last year, Tourism Minister Anton Kliman said at the ITB travel show in Berlin on Wednesday. ITB is the largest tourism fair in the world and this year it celebrates its 50th anniversary. From March 9 to 13, more than 10,000 exhibitors from nearly 190 countries, including Croatia, will present their products and services in Berlin. Kliman visited the Croatian stand and met with German travel agents. He told reporters that the Ministry of Tourism would make its contribution to the 2016 state budget by reducing its budget by about 10 million kuna. Kliman said that his ministry's budget for this year would be about HRK 170 million (EUR 22.3 million) and that the reduction would not affect the activities of the ministry or those of the Croatian Tourist Board. He said that this year's season would be as good as last year's.

Croatia's National Tourist Board (HTZ) has launched a spring promotional campaign under the slogan "Say hello to someone you love, say hello to spring. Experience spring in Croatia" which it will carry out until the end of month on markets with a big potential for arrivals in the low seasons, the HTZ said on Monday. The campaign refers to the seasons before and after the summer and it began on March 1 in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Austria, France, Sweden, Switzerland and Slovenia, whose citizens, as polls show, like to travel at that time of the year.