Tourism might appear to conflict with the protected area’s main goal, which is the protection and preservation of natural and cultural heritage. But it can be managed if nature protection is put first.

Brijuni National Park context

Brijuni National Park is located in the Republic of Croatia in southern Europe. With its 14 islands, islets and the surrounding sea it covers an area of almost 34 square kilometres. It is the only park in Croatia that, due to historical circumstances, is presently uninhabited and is entirely owned by the state. Although the smallest national park in Croatia, it employs more than 200 people throughout the year (Appendix 2).

Figure 1. Aerial view of Brijuni National Park – the smallest national park in Croatia. The total area of the park is 33.95km2. Copyright by Brijuni National Park. Photograph by Renco Kosinozic. Reproduced with permission.

In the past, the islands were inhabited and abandoned several times. They changed owners, served as a quarry and a source of timber, and were an important military base. In the early 20th century, they were a popular tourist resort, and after World War II became the residence of the Yugoslavian president. Finally, in 1983, the area was declared a national park.

Revenues are generated in various ways, but mainly through tourism, including:

• Ticket sales

• Renting hotel rooms and villas

• Renting bicycles and electric cars

• Organizing conferences, team building, weddings and other events

• Restaurants, cafes and concessions

• Charges for vessels entering the national park.

Some funds also come from project grants.

Figure 2. Brijuni National Park income sources in 2019. Copyright by Brijuni National Park, 2019.

During 2019 over 185,000 people visited the park, with slightly more foreign tourists than domestic.

The European Union has been a significant source of funds for Brijuni, providing around US$7 million over the past five years. This has secured several jobs and significant investments in infrastructure and research. These funds are rigid and often extremely complicated sources of income, both in terms of the application process as well as in grant management. Depending on the size of the grant and the complexity of the funding mechanism, the park uses either its own staff or engages external consultants.

Challenges

The park receives a large number of visitors in a relatively small area, and is expected to be financially self-sufficient. The biggest challenge is how to retain financial sustainability without compromising the main purpose of the protected area – conservation of biodiversity. So far, Brijuni has managed to find this balance, but the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced additional challenges to this business model.

In 2019 (before the COVID-19 pandemic), Brijuni's budget was around €8.5 million, but in 2020 it dropped sharply. This is because the budget for each subsequent year is based on planned revenues for that same year. In order to accommodate this drop in revenue, the park management had to prioritize some costs (e.g., salaries, running costs and utilities) over some conservation activities and capital investments. In this way the park managed to cover all its costs.

Approaches and strategies

The park management aims to carry out the mission of the park while achieving financial sustainability by actively managing tourism activities and maximizing and diversifying revenue. The general approaches are listed below.

Outsourcing/concessions

Understanding that management of day-to-day tourism activities uses too many resources (especially human resources), Brijuni has recently been looking into renting out catering businesses such as cafes and restaurants. This proved to be a good strategy. The catering services still exist, but the park management is not burdened with activities that are not crucial for its functioning and the rentals generate significant revenues.

The same concept applies to scuba diving services and tourist boat trips around the park. Though the park still operates guided tours on the islands with dedicated and trained guides, other activities have been outsourced to local small businesses. Through public announcements for concessions and contracts, the park sets stringent conditions and rules of conduct for these concessionaires and monitors their progress.

Outsourcing/concessioning is also important as a mechanism to control and manage activities inside the protected area. For example, for scuba diving, there is a fixed number of people and dives per location per day.

Visitor management

By purchasing a ticket, visitors to Brijuni get an entire "package" (see below), not just the opportunity to enter the protected area. This is very important because guests need to feel that they have been given value for money, not just access to an area. Value for money, and consequently the ticket price, is not easy to estimate. It is always some function of “willingness to pay”, and this information is gathered through social media and/or questionnaires.

Each guest chooses the package according to their personal interest, as well as the time of the visit. Ticket prices vary throughout the year (US$25–40), and are highest during the summer months when the interest in visiting the park is greatest.

On the island of Veliki Brijun, which is the most visited island, guests are free to walk along numerous promenades and landscaped educational trails. They also have the opportunity to rent ordinary (US$6) or electric bicycles (US$12), scooters (US$12) and golf carts (US$24–47). Renting these vehicles is popular with visitors, making this a significant source of income for the park.

Before the pandemic, the best-selling package included boat transport to and from the island, a half-day tour of the island with a local guide (in Croatian, English, Italian or German), a panoramic train ride lasting an hour, a tour of the island zoo, and entry to all the museums and the visitor centre.

Figure 3. Guided tours by tourist trains are a popular way to visit Brijuni National Park. Copyright by Brijuni National Park. Photograph by Marko Vrdoljak. Reproduced with permission.

The pandemic has changed people’s habits. Presently, the best-selling package is one where guests visit the island on their own (without the personal guide), and create their own guided tour with the help of a mobile app. This package is cheaper (US$24–32), and includes boat transport to the island and entry to all museums, the zoo and the visitor centre. During the summer months, and especially during the pandemic, visitors appreciated the option of moving around the park individually or with their families, rather than sharing a crowded space on the tourist train with strangers, so the demand for electric vehicles and bicycles increased.

Running special events and programmes

Brijuni often organizes special events aimed at specific target groups (e.g. local stakeholders, families with children). Events are organized to commemorate special dates, such as Earth Day, Nature Protection Day, Biodiversity Day, Bat Night, Museum Night and dinosaur days (fossils of dinosaur footprints can be found in the park). The aim of these events is to raise awareness and educate people about a particular phenomenon rather than make a profit. The programmes convey important messages, which are linked to the park’s mission, and the tickets are significantly cheaper (US$10–16). These events are usually well covered by both traditional and social media.

Educational programmes for kindergartens and school groups are also offered throughout the year (except in the summer months). The goal of these programmes is to engage children in particular topics and instil a love and respect for natural and cultural heritage. While these programmes are available to all, they are mostly attended by local kids. These programmes are also cheaper than the standard excursions (US$11). While they are not cost-efficient from a purely financial perspective, they are very important for achieving the park’s mission.

The park offers special tours ("packages"), including:

• Nordic walking weekends

• Paddleboarding tours and kayak tours

• Underwater educational trails

• Team-building events

• Gastronomic events

• Photo safaris.

Presentations and weddings are also organized on demand. Weddings in a natural environment or in the church of St. Germanus within the park have become very popular in recent years, and people are willing to pay a relatively high price to celebrate their wedding day in a special place.

Although not all of these events are equally profitable, together they contribute towards a more diverse source of income, as well as visitor experience. Importantly, none of these activities has a direct negative impact on the park’s natural values (e.g. through disturbance of species or habitats).

Outsourcing communications and enhancing visibility

Because of the MPA’s reliance on visitors for revenue, the park decided to invest in building its visibility through targeted communications. If the protected area regularly appears in the media (newspapers, Internet, radio, TV etc.) in a positive context, people become interested and curious to see what is so special about it. The most efficient way to reach people these days is through social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

After it became clear that staff do not possess the necessary skills to maximize the park’s presence on social media, an external agency was employed. Although this comes at a financial cost, the online awareness and park recognition was apparent through a rapid increase in the number of social media followers (from 15,000 to 45,000).

Practical tips

Outsourcing

Almost all of the activities that have been outsourced were previously operated by the park. The concessions are awarded through a public bidding process. The general principle for determining the price for the concession was that the park gets the same financial and strategic benefits from the activity, but without the internal costs of running it. For example, if the profit from a restaurant that was run by the park was 20,000 kuna, the minimum bid for the concession was set at 20,000 kuna. In cases when there are no appropriate bids, the public bidding process is repeated, but with a reduced price.

When outsourcing tourism operations, it’s essential that the park authority retains a certain level of control over when, where and how these operations are carried out. The most obvious way of doing this is by including the conditions and rules in the contracts signed with the concessionaires. It’s also essential that the park authority consistently monitors the conduct of the concessionaires, as well as the environmental effects of their operations. A clause in the contract means it can be automatically revoked if the concessionaire breaches these conditions.

Concessions are typically given for relatively short periods of time, most often one to three years. In this way, it is easy to revoke or not extend the concession if the concessionaires do not meet the necessary standards.

Visitor management

The ticket price is also a mechanism to distribute the arrival of visitors more evenly throughout the year. Various discounts and special prices attract guests in parts of the year with fewer tourists, while more expensive tickets achieve the opposite effect. The same concept has recently been applied for daily visits after 6pm, when cheaper tickets can be purchased (c.20% of the regular price in peak season). The primary goal of this is to reduce the pressure on the park during yearly and daily peak times. In order to achieve transparency, avoid confusion and facilitate planning, all ticket prices for the year are available on the park’s website as of January/February.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that organized tours become less attractive to visitors in some circumstances, when many prefer to visit alone or in smaller groups, so it’s important that the MPA has options to fall back on. This is especially important if visitor fees are a significant source of revenue. As mentioned above, Brijuni has developed a mobile app to facilitate self-guided visits, which is regularly updated and upgraded. The app is especially popular with younger guests, and the fact that once downloaded there is no need for an active internet connection makes it appealing to foreign visitors.

Special events and programmes

Many variables are involved in determining the financial benefit of activities such as Nordic walking, paddleboarding/kayak tours and underwater educational trails. These include:

• Existence of similar offers in the vicinity

• Profile of guests

• Cost of set-up and maintenance

• Human resources needed.

It’s important to take into account the degree to which any activities contribute to the mission of the park. Many of these services are offered by local people. The local community also benefits financially by providing services (food, lodging, souvenirs) to visitors going to and from the park.

Communications and visibility

Commercials and videos are sometimes shot at locations of unique beauty inside the park. The park doesn’t always charge for this because of the benefits of the increased visibility this can provide (e.g. a video for a famous musician).

While targeted advertising is important, every article, photo or film published about the park can be considered as advertising.

Figure 4. Deer are among the many species that live in Brijuni National Park. Copyright by Brijuni National Park. Photograph by Marko Vrdoljak. Reproduced with permission.

It’s especially important that people recognize that the MPA authority takes care of the protected area and that the funds earned (including from the tickets they are purchasing) are further invested in protection, research, monitoring, education and preservation of the environment.

Social media is the fastest channel of communication with visitors. You can see quickly if you’re doing something wrong and quickly correct it, or build on what’s going well. It’s important to respond to both positive and negative comments, questions and provocations. Likes and followers are grown organically and through systematic digital marketing – for the latter, it’s best to engage an external agency. 

General recommendations

Implement commercial ventures responsibly

The Brijuni National Park authority inherited a number of functioning hotels and restaurants, and now has experience in both operating them itself and outsourcing them. We don’t recommend developing hotel or restaurant ventures inside an MPA without careful consideration of the environmental, social and economic impacts – particularly without assistance or consultation. Instead, you could explore other models such as public-private partnerships (see Module 3 Chumbe Island Coral Park case study). There are several reasons for this:

Perform economic analysis and risk assessment

It would have been useful to have a robust economic analysis to better understand the cost vs. benefit of all the activities that take place in the park, and to allow for more informed decision-making. Economic analyses and risk assessments are done by experts. It’s not always easy to give something economic value, especially in the beginning – you need to monitor the market and what values similar things have.

It’s always important to follow what people say on social media – for example, whether something is too expensive for them or they are happy with the prices. Simple methods like questionnaires – in person or through social networks – are a useful way to examine the market. For example, Brijuni did this for the ticket price – the main takeaway was that most people agreed that the ticket price was high, but were willing to pay more if they knew that the funds go towards nature conservation.

Use a management plan

It’s important to have a good management plan. A good management plan will define the goals of the MPA, as well as the finances that are needed to reach them. All activities should be oriented to achieve the goals of the MPA, either by directly contributing to the MPA’s mission or by providing finances for it.

Management planning was conducted using the protected area management planning guidelines of the Croatian government, which are oriented towards the Croatian and the EU context. Both the Brijuni National Park management plan and the management planning guidelines exist in English as well as Croatian, but are unfortunately not available online in English.

Create realistic annual financial plans

In addition to the management plan, it’s important to have realistic annual financial plans – meaning that the planned budget needs to be in accordance with expected revenues. The approach used for developing the annual plans is specific to the legal framework for Croatian public institutions, but at its core entails finding a balance between funds needed and funds available.

Limitations

In the context of the Croatian protected areas system, Brijuni is an oddity due to the extensive tourism infrastructure (hotels, restaurants, villas, trails) directly managed by the park. The highest revenues, as well as expenditures, are generated by these hotels and restaurants, which also employ the largest numbers of workers. All of this infrastructure (as well as the associated type of tourism) was inherited from before the area was declared a national park. It’s unlikely this set-up can be easily replicated in other locations.