Travel in Bosnia and Herzegovina: short stays and uncounted pilgrims

How Bosnia and Herzegovina counts its visitors

The Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina builds its tourism figures from a monthly report, the TU-11 form, which accommodation providers fill in from the guest books kept at reception. A tourist, in the agency's definition, is a person who spends at least one night in a hotel or other accommodation outside their place of permanent residence. Anyone who comes for the day, sleeps at a relative's house or stays in a room nobody reports is outside the definition.

On that basis the agency counted 1,963,443 tourist arrivals and 4,083,977 overnight stays in 2025, in a release dated 9 February 2026. Arrivals rose 0.3% on 2024 and nights 1.0%. Foreign visitors took 70.3% of the nights and residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina the other 29.7%. Hotels and similar establishments accounted for 93.7% of all nights in 2025, and campsites for 0.8%.

The 2025 total sits close to the 1,990,451 arrivals and 4,100,401 nights reported for 2019, and the years before that show how loosely the series has been quoted. Three Wikipedia articles give three figures for 2018: 1,465,412 arrivals, 1,609,310 and 1,883,772. The rise over the longer run is less disputed. Arrivals grew by an average of 24% a year from 1995 to 2000, after the decline of the war years, and the count stood at 747,827 in 2012.

Capacity is measured separately. In May 2026 registered providers had 21,848 rooms, apartments and camping units with 49,731 beds between them, 2.3% fewer units than in May 2025.

Which visitors pass through and which ones stay

The average registered stay was 2.1 nights in 2025, the same for residents and for foreigners. The foreign average hides two different kinds of trip.

Visitors from Turkey made 193,765 arrivals in 2025 and stayed 1.4 nights on average. Visitors from China made 90,832 arrivals, 20.4% more than in 2024, and stayed 1.2 nights. South Korean and Malaysian visitors also averaged 1.4. The agency records nights and not routes, so where these visitors slept before and after is outside the series.

At the other end, visitors from Kuwait averaged 3.5 nights in 2025, from Qatar 3.4 and from the United Arab Emirates 3.0. Saudi Arabia supplied 5.6% of foreign nights in 2025, although its arrivals fell from 92,166 in 2024 to 68,081. Egyptian visitors, 1,318 arrivals in 2025, averaged 3.6 nights. Wikipedia describes holidays in Bosnia as popular among Gulf Arabs.

The neighbours make up the rest of the pattern. Croatia supplied 14.1% of foreign nights in 2025, Serbia 10.9% and Slovenia 5.9%, and all three averaged between 2.1 and 2.2 nights. By May 2026 the order had shifted, with Serbia on 12.7% of foreign nights for that month and Croatia on 10.2%.

Why Međugorje sits outside the official count

Međugorje, in Herzegovina, has drawn Catholic pilgrims since 1981, when six local people reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The figures attached to it are estimates. Wikipedia's tourism article, in the paragraph on 2016, gives more than a million visitors a year and adds that the great majority are not registered by accommodation providers. A separate estimate puts the total since 1981 at 30 million pilgrims. Neither figure has an agency behind it, and neither can be set against the TU-11 count, because a pilgrim who sleeps in an unregistered room, or comes by coach for the day, never enters it.

The Church's own position has moved in stages. Successive bishops of Mostar ruled the claims groundless. In March 2010 the Holy See announced a commission under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led by Cardinal Camillo Ruini. Since 2019, pilgrimages to Međugorje have been officially authorised and organised by the Vatican. Authorising a pilgrimage and endorsing an apparition are different acts, and the sources cited here record only the first.

An estimate of more than a million a year for one parish sits beside a registered national total of 1,963,443 arrivals in 2025, and the two cannot be added together or compared. The published total is a count of registered beds occupied, which is what the agency says it is.

Visoko carries the same problem in a different form. Since 2006 Semir Osmanagić has promoted hills there as the "Bosnian pyramids", a theory scientists have dismissed as pseudoscience. More than 10,000 people came on the first weekend of June 2006, and Osmanagić put visitors to his park at Ravne at 92,000 in 2020. That figure is his own and appears in no official series.

How visitors reach Bosnia and Herzegovina

Four international airports serve the country, at Sarajevo, Tuzla, Mostar and Banja Luka. All four are government-owned and government-operated, and the United States State Department's investment climate statement for 2025 describes them as weak on connectivity and passenger numbers, with concessions discussed and lacking political support. Sarajevo's airport sits at Butmir, 6.1 kilometres southwest of the main railway station.

The railways are two companies. Railways of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina runs the lines in the Federation and Republika Srpska Railways runs those in the other Entity, both successors to Yugoslav Railways. The division was already an issue in 1997. The Peace Implementation Council's Bonn conclusions, which set deadlines for 15 December 1997 and into 1998, called the failure to restore railway traffic between the Entities a matter of great concern and asked for the High Representative's recommendation on railways to be implemented by 31 March 1998. The same conclusions welcomed two additional border crossings with Croatia and the opening of Banja Luka airport, and asked for further progress at Mostar and Tuzla.

Intercity buses link the cities. The tourist department of Bosnia and Herzegovina lists good bus connections between cities, and major towns within a day of the natural sites around them, among the things visitors value. Wikipedia gives 1.3 million registered motor vehicles in the country as of 30 November 2023, and driving is on the right.

The coast is a separate case. Neum holds the country's frontage on the Adriatic, about 20 kilometres long in one Wikipedia account and 24.5 in another, and its prices run lower than in neighbouring Croatia, which brings shoppers. Border formalities with Croatia are relaxed at peak times. The Bonn conclusions of 1997 had already turned to this stretch, asking that any special arrangement on transit through Neum, and on the port of Ploče, be consistent with the constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

What the Neretva valley holds for a visitor

Much of a visit to Herzegovina follows the Neretva. Konjic, upstream, keeps an old town and the Stara Ćuprija bridge. Downstream the river reaches Mostar, which UNESCO describes as a settlement founded in the fifteenth century on the crossing of a river and a land road. Two towers stood by the bridge in 1459, and the name Mostar, first written in 1474, comes from the mostari, the bridge keepers.

Most of Mostar's historic town and its Old Bridge were destroyed in the fighting of the 1990s. The bridge was rebuilt in 2004 with an international scientific committee set up by UNESCO, and the Old Bridge Area was inscribed in 2005 on 7.60 hectares, with a buffer zone of 48 hectares. UNESCO notes that the reconstruction was not hidden and that remaining original material went on show in a museum. A visitor on the bridge stands on a documented reconstruction, and the listing's criterion (vi) rests on that rebuilding.

South of Mostar the valley gathers several sites within a short drive. Blagaj sits at the spring of the Buna, a karst source whose river runs about 9 kilometres west to join the Neretva, and a dervish monastery, the tekke, was built beside it around 1520. Počitelj, on the left bank of the Neretva on the road from Mostar to Metković, is a walled town believed to have been built by King Stjepan Tvrtko I in 1383 and extended under Ottoman rule from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The Kravice falls lie on the Trebižat. Stolac has the medieval tombstones at Radimlja; UNESCO's stećci inscription of 2016 takes in 4,000 such stones at 28 sites in four states. The Neretva then crosses into Croatia, and Neum lies on the coast beyond.

What Sarajevo and its Olympic mountains offer

Sarajevo's tourism is chiefly historical, religious and cultural, in Wikipedia's summary, and the sites it names include the old town of Baščaršija, the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, the cathedral and the Roman springs at Vrelo Bosne. The National Museum, established in 1888, holds the Sarajevo Haggadah. The Sarajevo Film Festival began in 1995, while the city was still at war, and has continued since. UNESCO has held Sarajevo on Bosnia and Herzegovina's Tentative List since 1997, under the title of a continually open city.

The mountains around the city carried the 1984 Winter Olympics, held from 7 to 19 February. Jahorina took the women's alpine events and Bjelašnica the men's. On Igman, Malo Polje held the ski jumping and Veliko Polje the biathlon and cross-country races. Britannica records that the ski runs built for the Games were later used as firing ranges by Serb and Yugoslav army artillery during the war. Sarajevo hosted the European Youth Olympic Winter Festival in 2019, and new lifts and accommodation at Bjelašnica and Jahorina date from that preparation. Vlašić, in central Bosnia, runs a winter season of its own.

The monthly count puts the winter season in proportion. Foreign visitors spent 402,862 nights in August 2025 and 145,902 in February 2026, a fall of nearly two thirds. Resident tourists spent 133,124 nights in August 2025 and 70,435 in February 2026, so their figure roughly halved. The World Bank's climate risk profile for the country lists tourism among the sectors that warming threatens.

Where rivers draw rafters and anglers in Bosnia

Rafting is organised on the Vrbas, the Tara, the Drina, the Neretva and the Una. The Vrbas and the Tara hosted the World Rafting Championship in 2009. The canyon of the Vrbas between Banja Luka and Jajce carries fishing, rock climbing and walking as well, and the Ribnik and the Pliva are fished with the fly.

Jajce, at the upper end of that canyon, served as the capital of the medieval Bosnian kingdom and was the last Bosnian town to fall to the Ottomans, in 1527. Its waterfalls are in the town, and the natural and architectural ensemble has been on the Tentative List since 2006. The Anti-Fascist Council met there on 29 November 1943. To the northwest, Bihać lies on the Una, and the Una National Park takes in the travertine falls at Martin Brod, entered on the Tentative List in 2019.

On the eastern side the Drina runs past Foča, Goražde and Višegrad. The Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge at Višegrad was inscribed in 2007, and boats run through the Drina canyon towards it from the Srebrenica side. Srebrenica is also the place of the genocide of July 1995, which the history article covers, and the twentieth anniversary commemoration was held at the Potočari Memorial on 11 July 2015.

Sutjeska National Park contains the Perućica forest reserve, on the Tentative List since 2017, and the canyon of the Sutjeska river. In Bosanska Krajina, in the northwest, Kozara was declared a protected national forest in 1967, covers 33.75 square kilometres and keeps a large Second World War monument at Mrakovica. Britannica names Sutjeska, Kozara and Una as the large national parks and counts hunting among the uses of the mountains, with hunting societies holding thousands of members.

What the heritage list includes and what waits

Bosnia and Herzegovina had five properties on the World Heritage List by 2024. Two are bridges, at Mostar and Višegrad. The stećci are shared with Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. The beech forests are part of a European serial property with inscription dates of 2007, 2011, 2017 and 2021. Vjetrenica Cave at Ravno, inscribed in 2024 as a natural site, is described in the geography article, and UNESCO notes that its management body has limited staff, tourism included.

The Tentative List held nine sites in 2026: Sarajevo, Jajce, Počitelj, Blagaj, Stolac, Blidinje, Perućica, the Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo and Martin Brod. Five of the nine went onto it in 2006 and 2007, and Sarajevo has waited since 1997.