The first clear achievement in Dubrovnik was better destination management. The residents count with parking lots only for them. A new law on traffic was passed allowing to mark a zone as restricted traffic enabling only residents to go around the old zone. A limit to 2 cruises per day with no more than 4000 passengers at the time was established. In the end, even for visitors that spend only half day in Dubrovnik, but also for all visitors and residents the experience improved in pedestrian areas as well as in roads. It was critical that CLIA cruise association became partners with the port authority in order to better schedule for cruise arrivals two years in advance. All the measurements were conducted with Herit Data sensors to understand flows of visitors in the old part. As a result, it was necessary to modify a local ordinance to reduce the amount of terraces and public space used by commercial and tourism businesses in the pedestrian sides of the city to ease the flow of visitors and residents.

The city hall invested in improving the relationship with the private sector and saw the long run benefits of this cooperation. Local tourism businesses and commerce businesses saw it clear that it was a win win to improve visitor satisfaction by removing terraces and other elements occupying public space to foster expenditure of visitors. The main impacts obtained were to limit to 8000 cruise passengers per day, manage better cruise ship arrival schedule during the week, achieve better coordination and distribution of the passenger embarkation and disembarkation time (CLIA, Dubrovnik Port Authority) and develop a Berthing Policy. Find out more here.