Every morning, Mato Franković has a tricky balance to consider. As Mayor of Dubrovnik, he must protect the city of his birth while ensuring that its citizens and businesses earn enough revenue for this proud community to thrive.
Franković is in a unique position, perhaps only comparable to his counterpart in Venice. This amiable former director of the city’s main ACI Marina must stem the seasonal tide of visitors flowing into this precious, and preciously small, space, and yet still allow them to marvel at this historic jewel, enjoy its restaurants and drink in its cafés.
For anyone who may not have been here, it’s hard to appreciate the scale of this task – nor, indeed, the scale of Dubrovnik, its historic centre bisected by a single main street, Stradun, 292 metres in length. Leading off it, narrow cobbled thoroughfares climb towards the City Walls. Beyond lie museums and attractions that, sadly, not enough visitors take the trouble to see.
Until six years ago, cruise ships, coaches and taxis disgorged immeasurable numbers of tourists into the Old Town. Since taking office, Mato Franković has made it his mission to control these numbers. A few days ago, the mayor’s delicate balancing act was set off-kilter by a series of headlines proclaiming that Dubrovnik was about to ban wheelie suitcases from its Old Town and fine visitors for bringing them. Although the story was untrue, it did highlight the problem of overtourism, and bring into focus the urgent need for sustainability, as currently being addressed by a local Dubrovnik initiative, Respect the City.
Looking to set the record straight and outline the campaign in detail, city mayor Mato Franković sat down with Time Out Croatia:
“We have to go back to the year 2017,” he says, “when Dubrovnik made all the newspaper headlines as one of the cities that should be avoided in the future because of overcrowding and overtourism.
Just a few days afterwards, we received a letter from UNESCO, saying that Dubrovnik would be put on the list of endangered UNESCO heritage cities. And this was just 15 days after I was elected!
This was much more than just a hot potato. We had to do something. So, we decided to establish a programme that we called Respect the City, in order to send out a message both to ourselves, to respect the city and manage tourism, and to the tourists who are coming to our city, to respect the city from their side.
We wanted to send a message to everyone coming to Dubrovnik, regardless of the purpose, whether they’re a citizen or they’re a visitor”.
Ships, buses and overnight stays
“We divided tourism into three different areas. The first was cruise ships, the second was daily visitors coming from nearby destinations, and the third was those coming to the city to stay overnight.
For the first segment, we approached CLIA, the Organisation of Cruise Ship Companies, and we said to them, ‘Listen guys, we have a problem and we have to solve it, otherwise, whatever we are doing, jointly, is actually giving a low quality of service’.
While they accepted the point, they said they said that they needed time. We agreed, but said that there should not be any more than two cruise ships here at any one time. The other thing was that ships could not stay in the port for just four hours. They had to be in the port for at least eight hours.
The crucial thing is not the number of the cruise ships or the passengers from these cruise ships. If someone says that Dubrovnik receives one million passengers a year from cruise ships, that actually does not mean anything – the crucial thing for us is know how that one million is divided, daily, weekly, monthly and then yearly. It was not about the number – it was about the flow.
We managed to change everyone’s perception of the cruise ships and from the year 2019 until today, we haven’t had one problem, as far as that segment of tourism is concerned.
Then we targeted the second segment, daily visitors. The Pile Gate is the entrance to the Old Town. This is where all the coaches come to. When I asked my operators back then, did they know how many buses would be coming that day, they said they had no idea. So, I counted how many buses were coming daily, approximately 140-200. So, if you multiply that by, let’s say, 30 passengers, then you have almost the equivalent of one big cruise ship just of people coming by bus, something that’s not as visible as a cruise ship.
We created a web page and through it, if a bus is coming to the Pile Gate, you are obligated to reserve a slot, booked and paid in advance. Every half-an-hour, there can be just seven buses. With that number, we can manage.
Why is this important? Let's say there's a change in conditions. We receive a call from a cruise-ship company, and they say, there’s bad weather in Greece, we have to sail into Dubrovnik. We say, OK, no problem, but then we say, we cannot allow any more bookings through the bus webshop, and with this, you are actually managing the flow. The flow is crucial in every case.”
Reaching out
“Then we considered those staying overnight. These were the hardest to approach. It’s almost impossible to get in contact with all those people who are staying overnight.
At that time, we had the Dubrovnik Card. We converted this into the Dubrovnik Pass, put in digital form. The price would be the same as a single admission to the City Walls. But with the Dubrovnik Pass, you would also have access to museums and three free bus rides by public transport. So, for the price of entering the City Walls, you will have everything else, too, that was the hook.
That was very important for us, as through this, we would have the data with the visitor’s contact details. We could then send them an email, recommending they visit the historic centre this afternoon from 4pm to 6pm, say, as it would be a nicer experience then.
We don’t say, ‘Don’t come here, now there are too many people’, we just send them a simple message.
These three factors were crucial for Respect the City, and for us to head in the direction of sustainability. But that were not enough. The second thing connected with Respect the City concerned the behaviour of tourists who were coming to Dubrovnik.
The citizens of the Old Town told us that if people were walking within the City Walls without a shirt, they felt it was inappropriate. With my colleagues, we decided that it would not be right to fine people, but rather educate them, send them the right message. So we created an animated video with different scenarios showing what we think tourists should not do – not go around shirtless, not behave badly when they are drunk, and so on.”
And those wheelie suitcases...
It made headlines around the world, a tourist-friendly city fining visitors for wheeling their suitcases around Dubrovnik’s historic centre. It was false – but this doesn’t mean that the city, and its mayor, aren’t aware of the problem:
“First of all, I was stressed about the fact that so many people around the world saw this news. But then, I started thinking that they probably saw beyond this, and heard that Dubrovnik was now looking after sustainability.
When I spoke with locals, and they said to me, ‘Please try to inform people that early morning and late at night, when tourists stroll with their luggage on the street, it’s too noisy. If you can succeed in reducing this by just ten per cent, life would be easier’.”
Again, the solution lies in communication: “Of course, we do not make this an obligation – that would be crazy if this would be an obligation. For some people coming on holiday, their luggage is pretty heavy. So it’s not easy.
What we are planning, and we’ve really worked a lot on this, is that we want to offer an extra service for tourists coming here. I spoke with a number of tourists, who told me, ‘We have a problem. When we leave our apartment in the morning when we have to check out, and then our plane is in the afternoon, we don’t have anywhere to store our luggage’.”
“Then I had an idea. As we’re building a public toilet inside the Old Town, we’ll convert part of it into a left luggage. I’m also thinking we could go beyond this – if someone brings their bags to the left luggage, why don’t we then take them to the airport so that they can pick them up there?
If Dubrovnik is a five-star destination, then we really should have five-star service.”
Looking ahead
Another aspect of Respect the City is regulating music coming out of cafés and restaurants:
“All of us live from tourism, and we need to have live music but it should be controlled, so that it doesn’t become problematic. This year we succeeded in this – last month, June, we didn’t have one single complaint about loud music within the Old Town, even though there were several concerts. So far, so good!
The main thing is that we keep heading in the right direction but it’s a constant struggle. We are now working a lot on traffic issues. Around the Old Town, we have a real problem as there are more than 8,000 taxi drivers who work around the Old Town. We are now lowering their number and prioritising public transport. If you’re stuck in a traffic jam, this is lack of service.
We hope that by April next year, we will pass a law giving priority to public transport.
We are implementing a management plan for the historic centre, the first city in Croatia to do so. This is crucial for the future of Dubrovnik’s Old Town. We believe that if the citizens of Dubrovnik’s Old Town are happy, then the tourists will be ten times happier.
We are looking at expanding the season. We are talking to the airline companies about their winter timetables. Especially British tourists, by the way – the Brits are number one visitors to Dubrovnik, second are Americans, third are Germans. We are targeting the British market as our priority for the wintertime. The weather is calm – winter is actually really nice in Dubrovnik.”