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Croatia: The Most OTA-Dependent Market in AI Travel Search

Croatia has the highest OTA dependency and lowest direct booking score of any market in our study. For the country's accommodation operators, the AI visibility gap is the widest.

Metric Croatia 5-Country Average
Overall digital score 34.8 / 100 38.1
Content quality 51.7 54.0
Booking funnel 42.9 51.5
Trust signals 42.1 49.0
Technical SEO 47.7 53.5
Schema completeness 0.9% 2.0%
OTA dependency 30.7% 25.8%
Direct booking score 9.2% 11.3%
DMO citation rate 5.4% 6.9%

The challenge is structural:

  • Highest OTA dependency (30.7%) — AI sends Croatian travelers to Booking.com more than in any other market
  • Lowest direct booking score (9.2%) — Croatian property websites are the least likely to be cited directly
  • Lowest trust signals (42.1) — cancellation policies, team pages, and review integration lag behind
  • Lowest schema completeness (0.9%) — less than 1 in 100 properties have structured data
  • Lowest technical SEO (47.7)

The language trap: Croatian-language queries produce the highest OTA dependency across all markets — even for non-Croatian destinations. Properties with Croatian-only websites miss the "direct-friendly" English and German language channels entirely.

The opportunity: The bar is low. Even basic improvements — a booking engine, LodgingBusiness schema, English-language pages — would put a Croatian property ahead of 80%+ of the local market. The gap between Croatia (34.8) and the leader Austria (40.1) is 5.3 points, which can be closed with the fundamentals from the 90-Day Action Plan.

Croatian properties need stronger direct content around Dubrovnik, Split, and festival experiences — these are the queries where AI currently defaults to Booking.com.

Prepared by Nokumo Research | NOKUMO SERVICES d.o.o. (Infranet Group)

This research is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). When sharing, cite Nokumo as the source and include the Nokumo logo.

With contributions from: Dario Alfirević (Chief Researcher), Tihana Alfirević (Editor), Niclas Aunin (ALLMO.ai), Sophia Milewski (Smartness), Domagoj Davidović (MinusMinus Agency), Arne Petersen (VRM Days).