Foreign Labour “Rescuing” Croatian Tourism?

March the 4th, 2025 – Foreign labour imports are propping up the labour market, and that can can be sure of. What of the tourism sector, however? It appears that Croatian strongest economic branch is being heavily supplemented, and that foreign labour is rescuing Croatian tourism, too.

As IstraIN/Iris Foris writes, preparations for the upcoming tourist season are now in full swing, and the search for workers in the tourism sector has become one of the key topics. With foreigners being poured into almost all economic sectors, it seems that foreign labour will be the one to come to the rescue of Croatian tourism in 2025’s summer season.

Ivana Mehle, Deputy Director of the Croatian Employment Service (CES), recently spoke about the challenges of seasonal employment on the Studio 4 show on HRT.

Although employers are taking their seasonal preparations seriously and have been publishing job vacancies for this summer since January, the number of advertisements for seasonal jobs has been declining over more recent years. Mehle presented data confirming this: “During the first six months of 2022, 30,000 seasonal workers were sought on the Croatian job market, while last year, that number fell to a significantly lower 21,000, which is a decrease of one third.”

As one of the main reasons for the decrease in demand, she cites the liberalisation of the Foreigners Act, which has made it easier for employers to hire workers from third countries. Despite the decline in the number of advertisements, the need for qualified labour is not decreasing at all, and that’s because Croatian tourism requires increasingly high-quality service. People naturally want what they’re paying (through the nose) for, and any old waiter or chef will no longer do.

The greatest demand for seasonal workers continues to be in the hospitality and hotel industry, where workers are needed for accommodation services, food preparation and other such services. This is followed by administrative and support activities such as car rental agencies, travel agencies and facility maintenance, while the third sector in demand is transport and warehousing.

Foreign labour is pouring in to save the Croatian tourism sector this year, following a very similar path to the construction sector, which is also experiencing a continuous labour shortage.

“Croatia traditionally doesn’t have enough construction workers, which is why employers import them, mostly from Bosnia and Herzegovina. More recently, however, those workers have been arriving more and more often from distant countries such as Nepal, India, Bangladesh and the Philippines,” Mehle concluded.

Subscribe to our newsletter

the fields marked with * are required

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}