Austria Looks to Attract More Tourists from Neighboring Countries in 2009

Austria’s travel and tourism industry has plenty of reasons to celebrate. For one, it succeeded in increasing total number of overnights and visitors in 2008.

Austria welcomed last year 32.58 million travelers, up by 4.7 percent who spent 126.5 million overnights, up by 4.2 percent. Germany remains Austria’s top market. With 50 million overnights in 2008 (+4 percent), Germans reached almost 40 percent market share, surpassing domestic overnights (33.9 million). Other important markets are the Netherlands (9.5 million), the UK (3.9 million) and Switzerland (3.6 million).

The only relevant overseas market is the United States with 1.2 million overnights, in sharp decline over 2007 (-17.8 percent). Tyrol remains the most visited province as it generates 35 percent of all overnights followed by Salzburg Province (19.4 percent), Carinthia (10.2 percent) and Vienna (8.1 percent).

According to Stolba, Austria’s budget for tourism will not be reduced in 2009 despite worsening economic conditions. “I can assure that the Austrian Government remains committed to tourism. We even got an additional budget of €4 million for promotion that we will affect to our neighboring and domestic markets,” she said.

The fund would help to contain an expected decline in arrivals in 2009. According to the head of ANTO, Austria could see a drop of 2 percent to 3 percent in total overnights this year. In total, Austria tourism budget represents €51 million with approximately 80 percent going for marketing purposes.

Source: CaribbeanNewsDigital