Tourism in Croatia’s Split-Dalmatia County is increasingly shifting toward sustainable, experience-driven travel. One initiative leading this transformation is the Dalmatia Storytelling Destination project, run by the Department for Tourism, Maritime Affairs and Transport, Special Forms of Tourism Section.
The project’s goal is to empower local tour guides and heritage interpreters to turn their knowledge and experience into authentic, interactive, and market-ready tourism products.
Why now? Today’s travelers are not just looking for sightseeing – they crave stories that connect them to a place through culture, history, and local legends. Storytelling gives a destination unique value and makes it unforgettable.
As part of this year’s program, the Orioly team participated as an educational partner, delivering Orioly Masterclass sessions on digital promotion, smart tourism, and selling original tours online.
While everyone interprets the world through personal experience, only a few do it professionally.
In tourism, heritage interpretation is carried out by licensed tour guides, museum experts, historians, and educators working in heritage institutions and agencies. It’s a demanding and responsible profession – professionals must constantly improve their skills to deliver authentic, fact-based, historically accurate, engaging, and relevant experiences.
Heritage interpreters are the voice of the destination. Through their stories, visitors experience a city, museum, or tradition on an emotional, personal level.
When an interpreter wears a historical costume or narrates a legend interactively, visitors remember not just the facts but the feelings.
“As part of the Dalmatia Storytelling Destination (DSD) project, more than 60 new interpreters have been trained. They are now equipped to independently develop and market their own interpretative and storytelling tours.
Each tour created is a unique original work, developed over a period of more than six months. All products meet the DSD project’s quality criteria and are ready for the market.
As the author and manager of the project, and as a mentor in the creation of more than 60 themed tours, I realized that it is just as important to prepare interpreters for bringing their products to the market as it is to prepare them for creating them.
For many, this was their first tourism product, and thus the first time they found themselves in the role of entrepreneurs. Since not everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit or is skilled in sales and promotion, the need for acquiring micro-entrepreneurial skills became evident.
I have been following Orioly’s work for quite some time, and their product and business philosophy perfectly fit into our educational series Together to the Market. From our very first meeting, they accepted the collaboration as an excellent opportunity to jointly build a more competitive Croatian tourism market.
For the interpreters of Split-Dalmatia County, the Orioly team of experts designed a personalized series of online trainings called Orioly Masterclass. The goal was to help interpreters bring their stories from the physical into the digital environment, using storytelling as a tool we promote within our project.
For the first time, participants had the opportunity to explore digital tools and learn how, with minimal financial investment, they could maximize their business success. The lectures were clear, practical, and easy to apply, and participant feedback was extremely positive.
All sessions were delivered in a highly relevant and comprehensible way, and participants emphasized that the training greatly helped them in understanding challenges as well as the business models and solutions presented.
The trainings have also been published on the Dalmatia Storytelling Destination YouTube channel, making them available to everyone who wishes to successfully bring their product to market.”
— Renata Tešija, Senior Tourism Associate at the Department for Tourism, Maritime Affairs and Transport of Split-Dalmatia County, author and project manager of the Dalmatia Storytelling Destination project
The project follows the standards of Interpret Europe, the leading European heritage interpretation organization. Participants learn:
Without a clear concept and business model, storytelling remains a hobby. Through training, participants gain the tools to sell, promote, and sustainably grow their work.
Orioly delivered four specialized sessions, tailored to interpreters’ needs:
Each lecture lasted about one hour, with 30 minutes for questions and open discussion, creating valuable peer learning opportunities.
The entire series is also published on the Dalmatia Storytelling Destination YouTube channel, freely available for anyone wanting to market their tourism product effectively.
✅ Start with the story, not the location – tourists fall in love with the narrative, the site is just the stage.
✅ Authenticity is everything – stay true to yourself and the facts.
✅ Digital presence is essential – without a website and social media, your reach is limited.
✅ Networking builds partnerships – agencies and collaborators expand your audience.
🚫 Common mistake: focusing on what you know instead of what the guest wants to experience. Storytelling should be interactive and guest-centered.
The Dalmatia Storytelling Destination project demonstrates the importance of investing in the people behind the tourism experience.
Heritage interpreters are not just guides, they are guardians of a destination’s identity and ambassadors of authentic stories. With the support of education and digital tools like Orioly, they are ready to turn passion into sustainable tourism products for both domestic and international markets.
👉 Want to learn more about Orioly Masterclass and how we can help you transform your story into a market-ready tourism product? Contact us today.
👉 Explore more of our articles on digital promotion and storytelling in tourism.
ORIOLY
on September 9, 2025
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