**1. Introduction**

In the current era, which is heavily influenced by the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, with international tourist arrivals falling by 74% in 2020 (UNWTO 2021), it is crucial for tourist destinations to work on their brand and bear themselves in the eyes of tourists as a safe and secure place to spend their holidays. In the past decades, an increasing number of tourist destinations—cities, countries and regions—have applied marketing and branding practices to attract visitors and investors (Gertner 2011). Destination branding is one of the main topics in tourism marketing in terms of enhancing differentiation and competitiveness. This urgent need for destination branding has led to an increase in the number of investigations done on different destinations' brand equity (Oliveira and Panyik 2015).

Destination brands are very different from product brands. Destinations provide another quality than a material or financial one that can be refunded. Gartner (2014) stated, "Destinations are places of life and change". Change is the measure of brand stability, one of the main elements of branded consumer products. Destinations are multidimensional and provide different experiences to different tourists (Ruzzier 2010). Destination brands lack the brand stability that most product brands have. Several market segments consume it simultaneously; each consumer is compiling their unique product from the services on offer. Thus, destination marketers have less control over the brand experience than marketers of concrete material products or services (Hankinson 2009).

This article presents the results of a research focused on the evaluation of the CBBE destination of Croatia from the perspective of the citizens of the Czech Republic. This destination was chosen because it has been very popular in the last years in the Czech Republic. The aim was to find out what dimensions of CBBE are important in the case of

**Citation:** Cervova, Lenka, and Jitka Vavrova. 2021. Customer-Based Brand Equity for a Tourism Destination: The Case of Croatia. *Economies* 9: 178. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/economies9040178

Academic Editor: Aleksander Panasiuk

Received: 22 October 2021 Accepted: 11 November 2021 Published: 15 November 2021

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holidays in Croatia and what attributes constitute them. Croatia is the 18th most popular tourist destination in the world. Most of the tourists come from Germany, Slovenia, Austria and the Czech Republic. Tourism is one of the main sources of state revenue; it accounts for 20% of the GDP. Thanks to its location in the Mediterranean and the rugged Adriatic coast with many islands, Croatia is one of the typical summer destinations with a predominant seaside tourism. Tourists also visit many historic cities such as Dubrovnik, Split, Zadar, Sibenik or Rijeka. There are ten monuments on the UNESCO list in the country (e.g., Plitvice Lakes National Park, the historic town of Trogir or the old town of Dubrovnik) (Croatian National Tourist Board 2021). For several years, Croatia has been one of the top destinations visited by Czech residents in terms of the number of arrivals. Before the pandemic, approximately 800,000 Czech tourists visited Croatia annually (CSˇ Ú 2021). A sharp decline occurred in 2020, when tourism worldwide was affected by the global COVID-19 epidemic and only 481,000 Czech tourists visited Croatia, despite the fact that Croatia was one of the first countries to open its borders to Czech tourists (Ministry of Tourism 2021). It is reasonable to assume that the total number of Czech tourists in Croatia will be lower in 2021, although the destination has set favourable conditions for tourist arrivals even before the summer season. It should be mentioned that the results presented in this article were obtained by research done in 2019, when the occurrence of coronavirus infections was not anticipated.
