Vienna Celebrates Record Tourism Performance

22 Nov 2012

Tourism officials in Vienna say that the city saw a new record number of visitors in October notching up 1,092,000 overnight stays.

The city proved particularly popular with visitors from Turkey and Saudi Arabia in contrast to visitors from Germany where numbers fell by 5%.

Overall in the city's 10 most popular markets there was increases and decreases often in double digits. Guests for example from America increased by 18% and Russia by 10%. On the other hand the number of Italians fell by 20% and the numbers of French by 12%.

The fact that there was an overall increase was in part because of a substantial increase in various markets including the number of visitors from Turkey which rose by 124% and from Saudi Arabia where there was a doubling of the number of visitors.

In part the easing up the Visa restrictions had a positive effect on the number of visitors.

The success story however was not repeated across the sector – and while four-star hotels and the more basic operations performed well – the luxury hotels and the three star segment performed more poorly than in the same period last year.

Turnover was also at a record level. Although the figures for October are not yet in the figures for September reported at the same time as the overnight stays for October showed that the Vienna hotels took in 69.6 million euros – more than in any other month.

One of the main pluses was the strong congress performance which allowed the city to beat even the figures from the football when the European championship took place in June 2008.

Source: http://www.austriantimes.at/news/Business/2012-11-21/45561/Vienna_celebrates_record_tourism_performance