New "United Cities of Tourism" Campaign Aims to Strengthen City Tourism Across Europe
With a new campaign, the city tourism in Europe, which has suffered extremely by the Covid-19 pandemic, should be stimulated again. Several destinations across Europe will participate and the goal is to support each other in strengthening tourism. Read on if you want to know more about this interesting campaign.
The campaign should help to strengthen tourism again. / Picture: © Flickr / Christine und Hagen Graf (CC BY 2.0)
Life takes place in cities. They are meeting places, cultural hubs, mobility hubs, mixtures of local and international influences, and drivers of innovation. Before Covid-19, city trips were the driving force in tourism - in Austria and throughout Europe. After a sharp Covid-related decline in tourism, the new "United Cities of Tourism" campaign now aims to reverse the trend.
The concept is as simple as it is exciting. For every 100 tourists arriving in Vienna in May/June 2022, one Viennese:will be sent to a city in Europe such as Paris, London, Berlin, Zurich, Milan or Barcelona. This should give more than 2,000 Viennese the chance to get to know Europe.
Intercultural exchange is to be promoted by the campaign and city tourism is to be celebrated and strengthened again together.
The Tourist Boards of London, Paris, Berlin, Milan and Barcelona are joining the common message on May 15 as part of a "social media swap," demonstrating cohesion by each sharing images of the other cities on their Instagram channels.
"Covid-19 caused drastic cuts in global city tourism, which will take several years to fully recover from. But on the way out of the pandemic, city destinations are united by one thing above all: optimism, courage and a willingness to push ahead with the restart and strengthen the resilience of the urban tourism industry for the future.
Because one thing is certain: when things pick up again, cities will return to their long-standing role as value-added engines, drivers of innovation and guarantors of year-round tourism jobs," explains Peter Hanke, city councilor for economic affairs.
Economic engine city tourism
Before Covid-19, city trips recorded the highest growth rates in European tourism. Information about this is provided by the "Benchmarking Report" of the City Destinations Alliance (CityDNA, previously: European Cities Marketing/ECM), the leading association of European city tourism organizations and convention bureaus, which compares the tourism key figures from 119 cities with those of European countries (EU-28).
In 2019, the average tourism growth in these cities was 4.9% to a total of 690 million guest nights - more than double the growth at the national level of the EU countries (still 28 at the time of the survey) of 2.2% to 2.9 billion overnight stays. As a reminder, Vienna counted 17.6 million overnight stays (+6.8%) in the record year 2019 and cracked the one-billion-euro mark in lodging revenue for the first time.
Sustainable form of travel
The fact that sustainability and urbanity go together very well can be seen in city tourism, where guests make use of the same infrastructure as the local population and, conversely, guests help to finance this infrastructure through their visit.
In Vienna, this can be illustrated by the example of public transport, but also by the numerous cultural institutions: They attract visitors from all over the world, but were not built for them.
The much-cited "last mile" in the journey, i.e. the last kilometers between arrival at a main traffic junction and the accommodation, is solved in Vienna in a sustainable way by the dense network of public transport.