About 70 percent of Norwegians say they want to travel abroad for this year's holidays, and their top two most desirable destinations are the sun-soaked Greece and Croatia, according to a survey conducted in Norway by the local tour company Apollo cited by Croatia's state tourism board HTZ and carried by state agency Hina on Wednesday.

The survey was conducted on a sample of 1,500 Norwegians.

“Air(line) companies from that market showed interest in increasing the number of flights serving Croatia this summer, compared to 2020. The (Swedish-based) SAS and the (low-cost carrier) Norwegian plan to operate routes connecting several Norwegian cities with Split, and with other airports along the Croatian Adriatic coast,”  Vedran Susic, the head of the HTZ bureau in Sweden, which also covers Norway and Scandinavia, said.

State agency Hina, said that in 2020 only 4,000 Norwegian tourists had visited Croatia, generating 24,000 overnight stays. This was a 98 percent drop from 2019, when 185,000 Norwegians had spent holidays in Croatia where they made more than 1 million overnight stays.