Over the first five months of 2022, some 8.2 billion kuna (€1.1 billion) worth of retail receipts were registered in the tourism and hospitality industry, the state agency Hina said on Thursday, carrying a press release by the Tourism Ministry, which cited data released by tax authorities.

Nearly all retail receipts are centrally registered in the tax authority’s database, and this data is commonly used to gauge retail volumes. The “tourism and hospitality” description probably involves all related businesses, from hotels and restaurants to bars and cafes.

On Thursday, Tourism Ministry said that the approximately €1bn in spending over the past five months marked “a 155 percent increase from the same period in 2021,” and also a 17 percent increase from 2019. The ministry’s calculation implies that the registered spending in these sectors of the economy from January to May was 3.2bn kuna (€425m) in 2021 and 7.0bn kuna (€930m) in 2019.

“This year, we have recorded 10 million bed nights almost a month earlier than last year,” Tourism Minister, Nikolina Brnjac, said, adding that “the value of fiscalised receipts was 1.2 billion kuna higher than in the first five months of 2019.”

The value of these receipts is measured in nominal terms and ignores inflation, which reached record levels earlier this year.

According to the national tourist board, Croatia logged 2.9 million tourist arrivals in the first five months of this year and logged 10 million bed nights. These figures were up by 175 percent and 153 percent year-on-year. However, compared to the same period in the record-high 2019, the last year before the pandemic, these numbers were still down 23 percent and 12 percent respectively.

State agency Hina added that by nationality the most numerous visitors this year were domestic tourists, followed by Germans, Austrians, Slovenians, and Britons.

(€1 = 7.53 kuna)