The collection of vignettes for tourist buses will bring hundreds of thousands of marks more to the city budget, according to the Mostar City Council, which made the decision on the collection of vignettes.
Penalties for disobeying the decision will amount from 400 to 1,500 BAM. However, the question is whether it will have a negative impact on the number of tourists in this city.
The decision exempts buses that perform public transport in accordance with the Law on Road Transport of the Federation of BiH, as well as vehicles that transport children to school, from paying the vignette. This is just one of a series of projects that the City of Mostar is working on in order to start systematically managing tourism.
“Vignette prices for those three categories have also been defined. We have two-day and seven-day vignettes, a two-day vignette for these three categories costs 25, 45 and 80 BAM, and a seven-day vignette costs 60, 120 and 210 BAM”, explains Ivan Barbarić, director of Mostar parking.
The income from the vignette will go directly to the budget of the City of Mostar, and the funds will be used specifically for the development and improvement of the tourist infrastructure. As they said from the company Mostar parking, they believe that the collection of vignettes should not have a negative impact on tourism in any way.
“Most agencies, carriers and all those who deal with transport are mostly familiar with what vignettes mean because they pay them in other cities as well. What vignettes should definitively do is to finally introduce a little order and a certain system into the traffic of all those in Mostar tourist buses,” Barbarić points out.
The Tourist Association of the City of Mostar also agrees that it is necessary to introduce order in traffic.
“People who bring guests to Mostar are not really used to order reigning in Mostar, we have witnessed that these buses park anywhere on green areas and this is one of those ways to put an end to this rampage,” says Mensud Duraković, Head of the Department Mostar tourist boards.
Nevertheless, tourism worker Davor Ljubić believes that this decision could threaten tourism in Mostar. As he says – he is not against the introduction of the vignette, but that it should have been done in a different way.
“It is necessary to distinguish between bringing tourists to Mostar and tourist visits to Mostar, in my opinion, this is the main obstacle in the introduction of this regulation. The city of Mostar is not a protected entity, but the area around the Old Bridge should have been protected, and in my opinion, this is an aggravating circumstance and I think that one-day trips will decrease a lot this year”
Vignettes can be purchased in two ways, online or at city partners, which are mostly gas stations or agencies. “Mostar parking” will monitor the implementation of this decision on the ground and provide technical support.
