THE CONVERGENCE OF CROATIA’S WELLNESS TOURISM OFFER TOWARDS BENCHMARK DESTINATIONS IN EUROPE: PERCEPTION OF WELLNESS EXPERTS

Purpose – The intent of this study was to compare the extent to which Croatia’s wellness tourism products are comparable to those in the leading wellness destinations in Europe. The purpose of this paper is to explore wellness experts' perception of possibilities and limitations of Croatia's convergence to contemporary wellness trends, to explore willingness and intention of service providers to improve their wellness tourism products, and to provide some policy recommendations that would bring Croatia's wellness destinations closer to benchmark wellness destinations in Europe. Methodology – This qualitative research is based on primary and secondary data collection. A desk research method was used to identify the key trends, select benchmark destinations, and to analyze Croatia’s wellness tourism offer. For primary data collection, a focus group was used to explore experts' perception on wellness tourism offer in Croatia and willingness and intention of wellness service providers to improve their offer according to global trends. Findings – The research proved that wellness is still an increasingly attractive tourism product, but also revealed large variations in its quality across Europe. Although Croatia’s wellness tourism offer suffers from mediocrity, absence of standards and vision of future development, it has significant potentials to become internationally competitive. Contribution – The main contribution of this research is four-fold: 1) provides overview of new market trends in wellness business, 2) enables insight into current state and ways of improvement of wellness tourism offer in Croatia, 3) discusses intention of wellness managers to improve wellness tourism offer, and 4) provides some policy recommendations to improve its convergence towards global standards and best practices.