For Zvonimir “Z” Androic, helping people discover Croatia is a passion — one he inherited from his mother. Androic is the president and founder of Via Croatia, a destination management company (DMC) that his mother started back in 2002, and that he helped expand to the U.S. market in 2014.
Since then, the company has worked exclusively with travel advisors to arrange custom FIT travel, group trips, shore trips, meeting and incentive groups, villa rentals, yacht charters and even destination weddings. In addition to Croatia, its destination offerings span Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Albania. And Androic says Greece and Italy are being added to that list to give advisors even more possibilities for working with the company.
“Everything that we do, marketing-wise, is aimed toward travel agents,” he said. “What we do differently is we try to always innovate both with our marketing tools and also with our product.”
Everything that we do, marketing-wise, is aimed toward travel agents.
Androic sat down with us to share some of those key tools and differentiators that Via Croatia offers to help advisors sell the region seamlessly, from weekly webinars and branded webpages to FamFest, a 60-advisor fam trip that garnered 4,000 applications from interested advisors (and is returning for 2025).
So, what makes Via Croatia a standout partner for travel advisors?
Everything we do is fully custom, and a lot of the things we do are not bookable through any other DMC, but only through us.
Credit: 2024 Via Croatia
And what we really do the best is our standards of service. We know exactly how every vehicle needs to be, how every guide needs to act. We have clear guidelines for literally every service that we provide, and based on our reviews, we see that the service is always really top-notch.
Everything we do is fully custom, and a lot of the things we do are not bookable through any other DMC, but only through us.
We are also the only DMC in Croatia that, besides doing land trips, operates its own yacht charter fleet. So, we don’t use other brokers, we actually have yachts under our full management. Why is that good? Because we have more flexibility. Our charters don’t have to be [a certain number of] nights. They can [embark] midweek, and they can combine land and sea.
Are you seeing a greater interest in yacht charters right now?
I think that sea and land itineraries are on the rise, and people — especially Americans and especially travel agents — are now starting to get into the yachting space more and more. When people booked yachts, they would traditionally go to brokers. But I see that more and more agents are now getting into this space, and they’re starting to learn more about how yacht charters work.
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And we’ve seen a lot of agents grow their yacht business quite a bit in Croatia, because the country is perfect for it. It has more than 1,200 islands. So, it’s really great place for the yachting experience.
Credit: 2024 Via Croatia
Since you work exclusively with advisors, what kinds of tools do you offer to help them sell?
One thing is our Flex Page concept. For our sample itineraries and our yacht pages, we have automated our content so all advisors need to do is sign up, and [the pages] get branded with their logo and their contact information. And every time we add a new yacht or sample itinerary, they get a notification that there’s something new they can promote. They all live in what we call our Flex Page Vault, where agents can access the pages at any time and share their unique link with clients. And we’ve seen great use of these.
In addition, we have our Social Media Vault, where [advisors] can download photos or videos. We write text for them, we research hashtags for them, so they don’t have to worry about anything. They just take that concept, download it and use it for their social media. It’s very easy.
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Those two tools work in conjunction very nicely, but we also decided to invest a lot of money in media. So, every sample itinerary [for Croatia] has a photobank and video that we filmed, which they can access on the Flex Page Vault. I don’t think there is any other DMC in Croatia that has access to so many visuals. Even the Croatian National Tourist Board told us that we have quite a lot.
And the visuals are what’s going to get people to book, right? So, we are focusing more on video. This year, we are sending the crew to film Slovenia, Albania and Montenegro, so hopefully, in the next year, we’ll have all our destinations and experiences covered.
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One other thing you did recently was your FamFest — tell us a bit about that, and other fam opportunities with Via Croatia.
This year, we basically organized our first travel agent festival in Croatia, with five different yachts traveling around the country on different experiences. Our final count was around 4,000 applications for the fam, and we only picked 60 of them. We displayed all the yachts so the agents could do site visits and see all the different styles and features. One even has our first-ever floating pickleball court.
Our final count was around 4,000 applications for the fam, and we only picked 60 of them.
We’re now accepting applications for next year, and I think we’re up to about 1,500 already. We’ll be closing applications by November and picking 30 or 40 agents. We’re going to do it on a little smaller scale this year so it’s easier to handle.
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But we also do a lot of self-created fams, because a lot of agents have specific interests, and we create individual fams for them.
If an advisor hasn’t worked with you before, where should they start?
By contacting us. We are always very available. We do a lot of “discovery calls” where we try to learn about the advisor. What is it that you sell? What’s the community that you live in like? Where can you advertise? We really help them break out of their everyday routine and think outside the box to start promoting. And once we learn about them, we point them in the right direction: Here is a sample itinerary, here’s what we can customize for you.
We’re here to help agents sell. Our main goal is to educate them on Croatia and teach them about the product.
We also do a live webinar every week with hundreds of agents who join. Every Thursday we pick a topic — everything from yachting to what to do on a specific island or in a certain destination, or what’s coming in Croatia in the next year. Don’t imagine presentation slides. It’s a conversation between people. Agents ask all their questions, and we answer. We show photos and videos, we bring a map to show them where things are and how to get around, stuff like that.
We’re here to help agents sell. Our main goal is to educate them on Croatia and teach them about the product, and then they have all our resources. But that’s why we’re different — because we’re not just throwing “buy this, buy that” at you. We will show you how to sell it, and teach you all about it so you can sell like a pro.
