Split has an accommodation problem, and it is not a shortage. Croatia's second city currently offers 27,726 commercial beds in private household accommodation - 5.4 times more than its 5,111 hotel beds. Private flats and rooms make up over 68% of the city's commercial capacity, hotels just under 13%. A new destination plan wants to shift that balance, and the fight over how is now out in the open.
The draft Split Destination Management Plan 2026-2029, prepared by the Institute for Tourism, proposes raising the share of hotels and campsites in the city's total commercial accommodation from 18.2% to 30%. The small-landlord association SMOi read that as a plan to shrink private accommodation and lobbied the city against it, pointing out that the plan's own data shows more than 85% of tourists are happy with the quality of where they stay. The plan's authors, Snjezana Boranic Zivoder and Ivo Beros, counter that nobody is suggesting a 65% explosion in actual hotel beds - just a bigger share of the overall mix, helped along by two new hotels already in the pipeline with more than 850 beds between them.
The real argument is about when people visit, not just where they sleep. Hotels in Split run at roughly 160 occupied days a year; private household accommodation manages around 80. And nearly half of all overnight stays in those private places happen in July and August alone. The contrast is stark: January 2025 saw 38,174 overnight stays in the city, July saw 678,911 - an eighteen-fold jump. The planners argue that a stronger hotel base, which operates year-round and hosts business and off-season travellers, is one lever for stretching the season and easing the summer crush.
Then there is the housing angle, which is where tempers flare. SMOi president Vedran Tomic argues the city cannot treat a tourist bed as a problem when it sits in a citizen's flat but fine when it belongs to a hotel, and points out the plan itself flags capacity for nearly 15,000 new apartments while saying little about activating idle state and city properties for housing. Beros responds that private accommodation is only one of many pressures the plan weighs - traffic, noise, waste, infrastructure and the concentration of tourism in a small area all factor in.
For travellers, little changes immediately. The plan still needs to clear public consultation, then a Tourist Board council vote, then Split's City Council. But if it lands, expect a slowly growing hotel scene alongside the apartments Split is famous for - and, in theory, a city worth visiting outside peak season rather than only in it. Anyone who has tried to find a reasonably priced room on the Riva in August will understand why the city wants more visitors in, say, May or October. Whether private landlords should pay the price for that shift is the question Split has not yet answered. Credit: Total Croatia.
