Promocija ruralnih turističkih destinacija: analiza službene web stranice za Hrvatsku kao turističku destinaciju

At the time when tourism destinations are looking at opportunities to diversify their offering and focus predominantly on regional tourist markets due to the changes in global mobilities, tourism and leisure during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is of central importance to reflect on opportunities these changes offer for rural tourism development. With this in mind, this paper first provides an overview of key changes to mobility, tourism and leisure in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic before moving onto the case of Croatia, whose geographical position in the South-East of Europe and accessibility for regional European markets made it one of the ideal locations for a range of rural tourism developments during the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, this context amongst other considerations also brought with it the question of destination image and in particular whether Croatia is portrayed and perceived as a destination with a rich rural tourism offering. In attempting to at least partly answer this question, we rely on content and semiotic analysis of the current official tourism campaign ‘Croatia - full of life’ in order to shed the light into the modes in which representations of rural tourism are included in the current tourism campaign. We conclude the paper with reflections on the overall importance of rural tourism for regional markets during and after the COVID19 pandemic and highlight the role meaningful inclusions of representations of rural tourism in official promotional materials can play in contributing to strategically desirable shifts in the country’s overall destination image. These desirable longer-term shifts in the overall destination image we argue could, in their own unique way, make an important contribution to ensuring that a wide variety of rural tourisms which have either been further popularised or which had emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic continue to be successful long into the post-pandemic future.